


Firestorm

by Evilchuckles



Category: Saiyuki
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Drama, Historical horrors of all types (mostly only referred to), M/M, Potentially triggering references to past attempted sexual assault of a minor, Potentially triggering references to past consensual relationship between siblings, Romance, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-29
Updated: 2011-09-29
Packaged: 2019-07-18 20:31:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 19
Words: 54,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16126181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evilchuckles/pseuds/Evilchuckles
Summary: On the British home front in the Second World War Harry (Hakkai) is about to fall in love.Considering what happened the last time he fell in love, this might be unwise.(Previously published on Livejournal)





	1. Chapter 1

Harry smelled of smoke. Probably. He couldn’t smell it anymore but no doubt he reeked of it.

Still, he’d smelt of worse things over the years.

The nice lady behind the bar gave him his beer while doing that not-looking-but-looking thing which most people did when the quiet, well mannered man with the unnerving smile glanced at them and they realised that there was something not quite convincing about his right eye. No matter how kind the individual they always seemed unable to resist a good stare just to be sure. Harry was well aware of it; had got used to it actually and waited patiently for them to conclude that, yes, it wasn’t a real eye and start blushing. He was never sure whether they were blushing because they were ashamed of having stared or whether they were blushing on his behalf, for being maimed.

If the latter he would have liked to reassure them that he didn’t care two straws about having a glass eye. That actually he didn’t care two straws about anything much.

But people always got strangely disturbed whenever he earnestly assured them of this and so he didn’t anymore. He only smiled. 

Which just seemed to disturb them more.

Oh well.

He drank his beer gratefully and it soothed the fire rasp in the back of his throat. It had been a long day. A lot of the fires from last night’s raid had still been burning when he started duty and they had spent the last eight hours putting them out. By evening they had all been black with dust and ash. Even Joseph’s red hair had been dark with smoke and dirt, showing through only in places so that, striding through ruined burning buildings, he had looked like some kind of devil, a creature of crimson and pitch.

When Harry told him this Joseph had laughed. 

Now, as Harry waited for Joseph to finish romancing the WAAF three barstools down, he wished, not for the first time, that he could laugh as freely and easily as Joseph. It was a good sound. It made Harry feel something other than detached and so it was a precious thing, to be guarded jealously.

Which was maybe why Harry was having to resist glaring balefully at the WAAF and why he was relieved when she told Joseph to sod off. 

“Worth a try,” Joseph grinned, plonking himself down on the stool next to Harry and reaching for his beer. 

“What went wrong?” Harry asked. Usually Joseph was conspicuously successful with the ladies. They couldn’t resist touching his hair. And other things, as Harry was only too conscious of, having had to stick his fingers in his ears a few times back at the boarding house so that he couldn’t hear Joseph and a young lady (sometimes two young ladies) on the other side of the wall.

“Married. Husband in a POW camp.”

“Ah.” Harry nodded. In that case she needn’t have told Joseph to sod off. He would have given up anyway. He had a standing rule about never dallying with women whose sweethearts were on active duty or in camps. According to Joseph men who seduced women like that were the lowest of the low. 

Which just showed how little Joseph knew about how much lower a man could sink even than that.

“Come on Harry, you look like a wet Tuesday morning.” Joseph sighed, poking Harry in the arm. 

“I assure you that I’m quite well.” Harry told him.

Joseph snorted. “And I’m Gracie Fields. Drink your beer.”

Harry couldn’t suppress a faint smile. Joseph’s forthright ways were oddly cheering. His bluntness was one of the first things that had attracted Harry to him. He had leaned forward, five minutes after they met, and said, ‘what’s with the eye?’ It had been strangely nice to have it openly referred to by someone. As if it was just one of those things and not something too shameful to discuss. 

“You’ve been a misery for weeks now, even for you.” Joseph added, raising his tankard again. “We need to get you a sweetheart. I never knew a man who needed it more.”

Harry cringed. 

Of course there were disadvantages to Joseph as well. 

Not that it was Joseph’s fault. It wasn’t as though Harry had told him anything. It wasn’t as though Joseph knew what it did to Harry to even think about a woman in that way. 

After...

It had been three years last Monday and Harry couldn’t even confide in anyone. Not even Joseph. What was he supposed to say? How could he explain? 

If people knew they would lock him up. 

Again.

Round about then someone started mucking about on the piano. Harry’s heart sank and he met Joseph’s eye. Joseph looked grim. Please god no. Not after the day they had just had. 

But fate it would seem was not on their side because a horribly familiar music hall song was beginning to emerge from the aimlessly tinkling ivories and it was just a matter of time now before their quiet beers were interrupted by truly awfulsinging. 

Harry rather hoped there would be an air raid soon. Anything to not have to listen to Run Rabbit Run, again.

But then, unexpectedly, they were saved. A quiet but deadly voice emerged from a cloud of cigarette smoke in the corner and informed the impromptu pianist that any attempt to play a ‘popular’ hit would result in him being shot a new orifice. 

The music stopped abruptly.

Harry glanced at their saviour, planning to nod his thanks, and found himself pinned by two of the bluest eyes he had ever seen outside of a Renaissance painting. Admittedly, based on the ‘shove off and jump on a landmine’ expression emanating from said eyes, the painting in question would have been of one of God’s angrier angels but that didn’t detract from the sheer beauty of a man who was somehow managing to smoke, glare, and ignore and simultaneously threaten everyone in the room, all at the same time. Without saying a word.

“Oy!”

Harry jumped out of his skin to find that Joseph had just poked him in the arm, quite hard, and was staring at him in bemusement. 

“Er...yes?” Harry asked, willing his gaze not to slide back to the man at once.

“I just said your name about three times!”

“Did you? Sorry.” Oops. How long had Harry being staring?

“I was saying,” Joseph continued, “That we should buy that RAF fellow a drink, seeing as how he saved us from the fourth pub sing-a-long this week. Because, I don’t know about you but after today I just wanted some quiet.”

Yes, Harry thought. He knew they were both thinking about the same thing. About the woman who had come back after a night shift at the armaments factory to find them putting out the fire which had gutted her house. 

The house her elderly mother had been sleeping in.

The screaming was still ringing in Harry’s ears. 

“Good idea.” He said. “I’ll go and ask him what he wants.”

“Yeah,” Joseph looked over to the man in the corner who was currently chastising another young man, also in RAF uniform, with a rolled up newspaper. “He doesn’t look like the beer type. Posh, if you ask me. Public school probably.”

“You can’t know that.” Harry snorted, standing up.

Joseph grinned. “I can. My step-mother was the biggest snob on earth. I can spot a nob at a hundred yards. I got that from her. Among other things.”

Harry resisted an urge to touch Joseph’s scars and promise, vehemently, to find that step-mother and make her sorry. 

And that reaction, that watered-down taste of the almost uncontrollable rage over someone having hurt a person he cared about, was the exact reason why Harry was glad he wasn’t romantically in love with Joseph. 

And the same reason why it felt very foolish to go to talk to the RAF chap.

Because Harry recognised this feeling in his gut. Desire. He hadn’t felt it in a very long time and it scared the life out of him. Yet, somehow, he was walking over to the cloud of cigarette smoke and the newsprint-smeared young man sitting next to it. The young man cast him a suspicious look when Harry approached, as if Harry might be up to something. 

Harry gave him what he hoped was a reassuring smile. Then turned to the vision.

“How do you do?” Harry said, desperately.

Those eyes looked at him, coolly, “Can I help you?”

“Well, you just did actually. Ha ha. By stopping the music. So I, I mean my friend and I, wanted to buy you a drink in thanks.” Harry could have sworn that his hair was sweating. The man had a way of looking at him as though he saw right through to his soul.

What there was of it.

“I’ll have a whisky.” The man said, inclining his head in a way that would have been gracious if he had smiled even a little. 

Harry hesitated.

“My name’s Samuel Korbett.” The man added.

Harry shook hands. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Harry Chawn.”

And their eyes locked, just for a second.

Oh no, Harry thought, Oh no oh no oh no...

“’Ere,” Samuel’s companion piped up, “I’m here too!”

Samuel rolled his eyes, “This is Gareth Sanders, mechanic, lover of pies, and general pain in the neck.”

“Evenin’!” Gareth grinned, apparently unperturbed by this introduction. “Have you got any food stamps what you’d like to trade?”

“’Which’ you would like to trade, not ‘what,’” Samuel corrected in the tone of someone who had had to do this many times before. Then Samuel blinked as the actual meaning of Gareth’s question apparently sunk in. Whereupon he hit the boy with his newspaper and exclaimed, “Don’t go around advertising your black market crimes to total strangers!”

“It’s not black market!” Gareth retorted, looking wounded, “I wouldn’t do that. I just really want more food stamps and if anyone’s got some what they don’t want, ouch! Samuel! Which they don’t want, alright! Well, I don’t see no harm in it!”

Samuel then tried to murder Gareth with the sports section though whether it was for trying to manipulate the ration or for continued crimes against good grammar, wasn’t clear.

“I like him.” Joseph announced calmly, from Harry’s left shoulder.

“Which one?” Harry asked, having to speak up a bit over the yelling.

“The common as muck one, of course! Not the other one, the one murderin’ with the newspaper. I reckon he’s a loony.”

Harry couldn’t really deny that.

A beautiful loony though.

 

Although they were starting another shift early the next morning and so really ought to be getting some sleep, Harry and Joseph somehow found themselves drinking and talking into the small hours with their new acquaintances. Or, more accurately, Gareth talked, Joseph talked and took the piss, Harry laughed nervously and Samuel devoted himself to smoking and occasional sarcasm. 

Harry found out a little about his new...friend but only because Gareth seemed to have no cut off point between his brain and his mouth despite frequent attempts at newspaper-assisted training in this from Samuel.

Apparently Samuel was currently on specially granted leave, having flown one hundred missions in two months and not got killed. This, according to Gareth, should finally prove the brilliance of Samuel to a world at large which, oddly, seemed resistant to the wonder of Samuel no matter how obvious it was to some people. ‘Some people’ being Gareth who, Harry soon saw, had a case of hero worship a mile wide which made him incapable of understanding why anyone wouldn’t admire Samuel on sight. 

Joseph, on the other hand, clearly understood it only too well. Harry watched, despairingly, as Joseph and Samuel took an almost immediate and mutual dislike to each other. Samuel was just the sort of chap to wind Joseph up. Well bred, educated, totally confident in his social position to the point where he probably didn’t even know where men like Josephcame from. Harry sighed as he once again turned the conversation in a less dangerous direction, because no good could come of the topic of the Jarrow Marchers if Samuel and Joseph were in the same hemisphere while it was being discussed. 

“So...Gareth, how long are you both on leave for?” Harry interjected, just as the other two were about to get up a head of political steam. Gareth must have seen the danger too and eagerly jumped at the chance to talk about something less inflammatory. 

“We’ve got two whole weeks! I’m going to sleep ‘til nine every day! And Samuel has promised to drive me out to the country at the weekend and we’re going t’ stay at his big house and eat! Although...” Gareth’s nose wrinkled, “I’ve never been to the country. I might not like it.”

“He’s not sure what a cow is,” Samuel remarked, dead pan. 

Harry smiled.

“Of course I know what a bleeding cow is!” Gareth glared. “I’m just not definite that I’ll like them! Or all them trees. They always said at the children’s ‘ome, that we shouldn’t hang about in parks. And the countryside’s jus’ a great big park, ain’t it?”

“Gareth,” Samuel said wearily, flicking ash from his twentieth cigarette of the night, “It wasn’t the trees they were warning you about.”

“Weren’t it?” Gareth asked, wide eyed, and reminding Harry that, RAF mechanic the boy might be, but he couldn’t be a day over seventeen. 

Of course he wasn’t the first underage boy to lie his way into the forces. When Harry had gone out to Spain his own birth certificate had acquired a convenient smudge just on the date of birth.

“It’s what goes on in some of the London parks at night that they were concerned about. Not that they need to have bothered. You are more than capable of looking after yourself.” Samuel told him. 

Gareth still looked bewildered and Harry, with a sinking feeling, knew Joseph wouldn’t be able to resist enlightening him.

And, sure enough...

“He’s talking about nancies,” Joseph grinned, “who lure innocent boys like you behind the bushes for a poke, the dirty buggers.”

Gareth’s mouth dropped open.

And Harry and Samuel’s eyes met, irresistibly, shamefully, just for a moment before Harry flushed and dropped his gaze to the dusty table top. 

Harry’s stomach was squirming. Joseph didn’t mean anything by it when he said such things. They weren’t said with the venom that other man reserved for queers and Harry was certain that Joseph wasn’t truly prejudiced against anyone but the upper classes. In fact, Harry thought sadly, this was his own fault for never quite getting up the courage to tell Joseph that he had had male lovers. If he had been honest with Joseph (because telling Joseph he was queer was comparatively easy considering what else Harry had done) then Joseph would never have said such things. 

Joseph would never knowingly cause Harry pain or embarrassment. 

But he had.

Because Harry was a coward who couldn’t tell Joseph anything about his past, even though he owed it to Joseph to tell him why he had been so broken when they met. Joseph had helped him. Had talked to him. Had dragged him out of the hospital and to the pictures and to the pub. Had used his pre-war job as orderly to smuggle in books and magazines despite the doctor’s orders that Harry should have complete rest, because Joseph could see that the boredom and the lack of distraction was making Harry worse. 

Joseph had saved Harry, had bought him back to something resembling life.

And yet Joseph knew nothing of why Harry had been in the sanatorium in the first place. Like everyone else he assumed that it was shell shock from the war in Spain. 

Harry had let Joseph continue to think it. 

‘I’m just a lie,’ Harry thought, bleakly.

“What do you reckon, Harry?” Joseph’s voice broke into the darkness, as it so often had in the past and Harry clung to it gratefully, let it pull him back to the surface. “Gareth wants us to go to the country.”

Harry let himself look at Samuel, found that he was being watched by those blue eyes intently, and might have been so for some time. Samuel looked away at once as though bored. 

“If it wouldn’t be an imposition?” Harry said, tentatively. He knew he shouldn’t spend any more time with this man but he couldn’t resist. Just the thought of touching Samuel made Harry’s pulse throb. He couldn’t make himself pass up the opportunity for more time with him.

Samuel shrugged. “There’s room in the car and plenty of guest bedrooms at the house and if I only have Gareth to talk to for twenty four hours I may end up killing him.”

Joseph laughed while Gareth looked affronted. 

Almost hoping for a way out Harry appealed to Joseph, “But do you want to go? I’m afraid you would find it very tedious.” 

Joseph grinned, “I know I’m a city lad, Harry, but I’ll make an exception for a little holiday. Just think of all those country girls!”

Samuel rolled his eyes almost audibly. “I have to ask you not to ruin the reputation of any of the girls on the estate.”

“I solemnly promise not to leave any of ‘em any more ruined than they were when I got there,” Joseph told him, grinning evilly. 

Harry shook his head both at Joseph’s intention and at the awestruck expression on Gareth’s face. 

“Can you tell me how you get girls to like you?” Gareth asked Joseph, earnestly. 

“I’ve still got my gun,” Samuel warned.

 

They parted at three in the morning, with a plan to meet on Saturday. 

As Harry and Joseph wove their somewhat drunken way back to their lodgings Joseph asked the question Harry had been dreading.

“Why do you think that stuck up Samuel invited us to his country house? He ‘ardly knows us!”

“Perhaps he really is concerned at the prospect of spending a weekend with his mechanic. Young Gareth is quite...energetic and talkative. I imagine that Samuel would welcome some variety of conversation.” Harry babbled.

He could hardly say the truth which was that he had seen his own hunger reflected back at him from Samuel’s eyes. It was only the second time in Harry’s life that he had met someone and wanted them so intensely, so quickly, and seen plainly that they felt it too.

And the first time had nearly destroyed him.


	2. Chapter 2

Harry walked through fire, sleeping and waking. He found it ironic that he had wound up in an occupation where he was daily confronted by the former means of his own destruction, by the thing he had used to make them pay for what they had done to her. 

Everything reminded him. 

Even the red of Joseph’s hair.

But at least now, in the war at home, Harry could do something good, something kind. He could help to put the fire out.

Not start it. 

Not stand and watch it burn. Listening to the screaming.

Not that there wasn’t screaming now but it wasn’t Harry’s fault for once. Bomb after bomb fell, the old city was dying, melting, and whatever they did, whatever anyone did, it felt like too little. Too little was being saved. 

“You think too much.” Joseph informed him, after another long shift, as they got back to the lodging house, coughing and wheezing and black like miners from soot and smoke, “You think too much of things you can’t do. You can’t save everyone. You can’t stop all the fires. You’ll go mad thinking like that.”

Harry met Joseph’s tired, ash stung eyes. “You forget how we met. I already went mad once.”

Joseph sighed and poured them both a glass of the cheap whisky he got from the black market man just down the corridor. The whisky had become a ritual whenever they had had a particularly difficult shift. 

It was a ritual they seemed to have to call on more and more. 

“You weren’t mad, you silly sod.” Joseph told him, slumping wearily onto the bowed and ancient bed. 

Harry shoved up a little even though it meant being hard against the damp plaster of the wall. He was too tired to get up. 

“Wasn’t I?” He asked, grimly amused.

“Nope. I worked in that hospital for a few years. I saw mad. You weren’t it. You were just really, really...” Joseph trailed off. Then took a breath. “You were in a dark place. That’s all I know. You still are, some days, ain’t you? Today fr’instance.”

“Perhaps. It’s getting worse, isn’t it. The bombing.”

“Yes,” Joseph reached out a restless hand and burrowed a finger into the mattress. “It’s my belief that Hitler’s decided to finish London off. Reckon’s that’ll finish us.”

“London burned once before.”

“Not like this. Not for night after night. With everyone on their nerves every minute waiting for the next one. Waiting to die.”

Harry, concerned, turned his head on the thin pillow. “Now who’s in a dark place?”

Joseph shrugged. “Maybe I need this weekend in the country, even with that nob Korbett. Maybe some trees and grass and some quiet will perk me right up.”

“Don’t forget the country girls.”

A slow smile crept onto Joseph’s face. “Like I could.”

“He’ll probably change his mind, you know.” Harry warned, half hopeful, “You were right. He doesn’t know either of us beyond a night in the pub and he was half sloshed when he issued the invitation.”

“He’ll stick to it. RAF chap’s word; honour and all that. Anyway, people make friends quicker these days, haven’t you noticed?”

Harry snorted, struggling to put Samuel and the word ‘friend’ into the same headspace, but had to concede that Joseph was right. Since the war started, since the bombing raids had started, people were less reserved, less hidebound. More inclined to talk to strangers and get drunk, to have as good a time as possible in those few precious hours or days when they weren’t terrified or being shot at or bombed or, from what Harry knew of life in the RAF, all three at once if you were Samuel. 

Samuel... Harry must surely have imagined that thing between them, that other kind of burning. It was just the booze and Samuel’s undoubted beauty that had led to Harry getting carried away, overwrought. 

Yes, he had imagined it. 

There was no danger that Samuel would encourage Harry’s advances so there was nothing to fear. No loss of control to dread. No guilt to assuage. 

It would be alright.

It would.

 

By Saturday morning Harry was so tired, so smoky, and so profoundly sick of London, that he no longer cared what Samuel thought or expected of him. Like Joseph, he just wanted to get away from the fire and the noise and the remorselessness of it all.

Consequently he was unprepared for the sight of Samuel when he picked them up in his expensive looking car, had almost forgotten. Desire punched through right to Harry’s core again. He began to smile desperately. 

A thin fingered, elegant hand, waved them into the car, Harry next to Samuel in the front, Joseph in the back with an unfeasibly excited looking Gareth.

“Mornin’!” Gareth piped, cheerfully as Joseph grumbled his way in amongst various packets and boxes, trying to fold his long legs into the space left by Gareth. 

“What’s all this,” Joseph demanded, pushing a basket to one side.

“Food” Gareth told him, with a look in his eyes which made Harry consider exorcism. “Samuel’s been saving food stamps and never saying nothing about it!”

“’Anything,’” Samuel corrected, absently, as he started the car. “And of course I never said anything about it. If you had known that I had food stamps you would have pestered me for them day and night.”

Harry grinned to himself when he heard Gareth whisper vehemently to Joseph, “He’s brilliant!”

“Do me a favour and prevent Gareth from wiring through it all as we drive down?” Samuel requested, meeting Joseph’s eye in the mirror.

“Will do,” Joseph nodded, slapping away Gareth’s hand which had already started to reach out.

“I have a rolled up newspaper, should you require it,” Samuel added.

Gareth sulked.

 

However it never became necessary for Joseph to protect their feast by fair means or newspapery-foul means, because both Gareth and Joseph started snoring before they got out of London. 

“We spent the night in a shelter,” Samuel told him. “He hasn’t slept.”

“And presumably neither have you,” Harry said, noting the red rims to Samuel’s eyes for the first time. He had been too busy trying not to stare to notice it before. “Would you like me to drive?”

Samuel visibly hesitated. “Well...normally I wouldn’t let anyone else drive this car but...” he gave Harry a sideways glance, “You don’t seem like a maniac. Or no more than anyone else these days. Why not?”

Samuel pulled over next to a crater that had once been someone’s house and they swapped seats. 

Harry appreciated having an activity to focus on other than trying not to stare. Driving was calming, especially with the roads so empty. Petrol was as difficult to come by as everything else and there were few other cars. Samuel dozed for fifty miles and then woke up, smoked two cigarettes in rapid succession, and remarked, 

“Where did you school?”

“Winchester. You?”

“Eton.”

Silence for another few miles. Samuel was a man of few words, it seemed. 

“How did you end up chummy with Joseph? He doesn’t seem to have much time for...what was it he called me at the pub...oh, yes, stuck up, toffy nosed, types.”

Harry laughed. “I think Joseph considers me to be a special case. Besides I may come from money but I haven’t any now. I live at the same lodging house as he does, with the same mice and the same smell of bread and dripping.” 

“That’s war for you,” Samuel observed, staring out at the trees flowing by, London finally behind them. “The great leveller. How else would I have ended up with Gareth trailing round after me. In the normal round of things I would never have associated with a mechanic.”

“Nor I with a libidinous fireman,” Harry agreed. “So war’s not all bad.”

Samuel snorted.

“How did you get to know Gareth?” Harry couldn’t help asking. “You don’t seem exactly...destined for friendship.”

“It’s not friendship. I just can’t get rid of him. He was assigned to my plane last spring and I made the mistake of giving him food and now I seem to be stuck.”

Harry was sure there was more to it than that. Hero worship of the type Gareth displayed had to have been born from something.

“What line were you in before the war?” Harry asked eventually, after another long but oddly comfortable silence.

“The doing nothing whatever line,” Samuel said, “Cocktails and Atlantic crossings and shooting in the country.”

“Don’t tell Joseph that, for God’s sake,” Harry warned him, “You’ll just get a twenty minute lecture on the idle rich.”

“There’s a reason why the rich are idle.” Samuel shrugged. “It’s better than working for a living.”

Once again Harry thought there was something he wasn’t being told, or something he wasn’t getting. Samuel didn’t seem the aimless, playboy type. Somehow Harry was sure that Samuel’s pre-war life must have been more than that.

“What were you doing?” Samuel asked.

Harry swallowed and trained his eye on the road ahead. “I was in Spain for a couple of years. As a volunteer.”

“That’s how you lost your eye?”

“Yes.”

Harry liked it that Samuel didn’t express sympathy, or probe for more details. That he just accepted it. As Joseph had done years before.

Harry liked it a lot.

Samuel went back to sleep for a few miles with an instruction that Harry was to wake him at Salisbury to give further directions. 

Between Salisbury and Taunton they discussed books. 

Between Taunton and Tiverton they discussed music.

After Tiverton Samuel fell asleep again but Joseph woke up and demanded to know why the country was so boring and why there was so bloody much of it between London and Samuel’s house. 

Then Gareth woke up and tried to molest a pork pie.

So Joseph woke Samuel up and requested use of his newspaper.

 

So they were all rather tired and a little irritable (in Samuel’s case, a lot irritable) when they finally pulled into the vast driveway of a huge country house in the late afternoon. Harry almost heard Joseph’s and Gareth’s jaws drop. Even Harry was impressed. He may have gone to good schools and his father may have had several houses, but they’d had nothing like this.

“Good grief...” Joseph muttered. “I’m at a big country house for the weekend. I’ve read Agatha Christie. I know what goes on when you nobs get together. Someone’s bound to get murdered.”

“Yes,” Samuel agreed, getting out of the car and stretching, “With any luck it’ll be you.”

Joseph blinked and then burst out laughing.

A butler emerged ponderously from the front door as soon as the car came to a halt and Harry saw Samuel’s shoulders stiffen, saw him raise his chin a little, before striding up the steps, dripping with assurance, and saying,

“Good afternoon, Stephens. Have someone drive the car round to the garage, will you.”

“Certainly, Sir. And may I say, welcome home. We got your letter and the rooms are aired ready for you and your...guests.”

Stephens regarded the three of them doubtfully. Clearly they were like no guests he had seen at the great house before. One red headed scruffy sort. One grubby young mechanic. And one strange gentleman with a funny eye and a very peculiar smile.

Harry felt almost sorry for him.

The house was cold, even though it was August, and had a faint smell of damp as though it wasn’t really lived in. Harry suspected that most of the rooms were shut up when Samuel wasn't here and that Samuel hadn't been here for a good long while now. Harry couldn’t blame him if he didn’t want to live here full time. It was far too big for one person and there was no sign of any other living family member, past or present. Samuel had yet to mention any family and Harry was minded to find that significant.

“Gareth," Samuel barked, "help Stephens with that food and I expect it all to arrive in the kitchen without interference, alright?”

Gareth went off muttering. 

“I’ll show you up to your rooms to dress. Dinner will be at six. It always is.” Samuel told them as they climbed a very grand staircase. His voice was flat, he had seemed to shut down a little as soon as they arrived. 

‘If he dislikes this house so much then why does he come here?’ Harry wondered.

And Samuel did dislike it. It was in every line of him. In the tense way he walked up the stairs. In the brief venomous looks he spared for the ancient family portraits. 

Joseph was deposited in a guest bedroom and left looking scared and out of place so that Harry felt rather sorry for him. Dressing for dinner wasn’t part of Joseph’s universe and he looked as though he didn’t know what he was supposed to do. Harry suspected that he would end up wondering the halls taking the micky out of the paintings.

Harry’s own room was just next door and smelt as damp and dusty as everywhere else even though the windows were thrown open. He put down his small case and went to admire the view. The park stretched on for miles, golden with afternoon light, still and safe and as though there wasn’t a Blitz on anywhere in creation, let alone in London. 

It felt unreal.

Harry realised that Samuel was stood just behind him. He could sense him.

Feel his breath.

“It’s the park which brings me back,” Samuel said, quietly. “The trees, the river.”

“I can see why,” Harry replied. His heart was beating faster than it had any right to.

Any right to for anyone but her.

“The house itself could go to the devil, for all I care.” Samuel added, vehemently.

“Have you no happy family memories here?” Harry asked.

“None whatsoever. My father wanted the place to be handed down to the next generation. But,” Samuel sighed, the feel of it on Harry's neck making Harry grip the windowsill with white knuckled fingers, “I think you and I both know that I won’t be marrying and producing a bevy of brats.”

Harry was finding he had to remind himself to breathe.

“I’m not wrong, am I?” Samuel asked, when Harry didn’t answer. “You’re unlikely to marry either, right?”

Harry turned around and saw the foolhardiness of that when he was at once trapped between the window and Samuel’s eyes, which were dark in contrast with the August light down in the park. 

“There was a woman. Once. But otherwise only men.” Harry said. Samuel deserved candour after being so honest himself. After taking such a risk.

Samuel smiled, faintly. It looked awkward, as though he was out of practise at smiling.

“It’s a difficult business, isn’t it.” Samuel observed. “Being queer, I mean.”

“Yes,” Harry smiled, back. “It is.”

And for a moment they both just stood there, smiling ruefully at each other.

While the sun shone outside.


	3. Chapter 3

Samuel left him to dress for dinner but it was some time before Harry could bring himself to move. He just stood by the window, remembering the touch of Samuel’s breath on his neck, remembering what Samuel’s face looked like when he smiled. 

The glory of the park outside couldn’t even compare.

‘Help me, someone help me,’ Harry thought, pressing his forehead against the window frame, closing his eyes, ‘I can’t do this again. I mustn’t. I can’t feel this way about someone. It isn’t safe. It isn’t right.’

‘It isn’t sane.’

He couldn’t trust himself, couldn’t trust any of his decisions or his rationalisations. He shouldn’t have come here and he had known it from the start, whatever excuses he had tried to make. Now he had no choice but to get through the next twenty four hours without touching or kissing or trying for what he wasn’t to have. Ever. 

He hoped desperately that Samuel was the type to wait for the other chap to make a move, rather than take the initiative himself. 

But he only partly hoped that. Because he wanted him.

A trapped sounding half sob broke out of his mouth and was smothered against the window frame.

“Alright, what is it.” A voice from the doorway made Harry jump out of his skin.

He whirled to find Joseph leaning against the door, which Samuel had apparently left ajar, watching Harry with worried eyes. Harry hesitated. He could lie. He could laugh it off. 

But this was Joseph and Harry had wanted to tell him for so long and weeks of Blitz and exhaustion and horrors had worn down his resolve.

“Please sit down,” Harry said, suddenly weary, “I need to talk to you.”

Joseph came in, shut the door and settled himself into an armchair by the unlit fire. “I was hoping you would get round to this.”

“Round to what?”

“I know there’s something I don’t know. Ever since we met.”

“There are lots of things.”

“Start at the beginning then.” Joseph dug out a cigarette and lit it. 

“You might regret our friendship after I’ve finished.”

Joseph gave him a long, serious, look. “No. I won’t.”

Harry’s heart clenched. 

“Alright...” he managed. “In 1936 I went to Spain...”

 

He had been an idealist. They both were. Karen had dreams of democracies and utopias and equality. Such beautiful dreams. They had used to lie in bed together in dirty old London, and imagine glorious worlds. Before the war. 

When things still seemed possible.

So when their chance came, to go to Spain and volunteer against the fascists, to fight for something worthwhile, they had jumped at it. Barely eighteen and impossibly naive, with heads full of books and poetry, they had arrived in a country with the brightest sun either had ever seen, and within months had fallen into hell.

Books and poetry weren’t much use out there in the end.

But to begin with it was just as they had imagined. A real community of freedom fighters, a war being fought, not for empire, but for democracy and a free Spain. They lived off the land or melted into friendly villages, clashed with the fascists, bloodily, and it was sometimes terrifying and horrible but they believed in it. Harry taught Karen to shoot. Karen learnt some Spanish and acted as nurse. Harry gained a reputation for reliability and calm. For the first time in their lives they felt useful.

No one knew she was his sister so no one cared that they curled up together under the trees in the same blanket. No one cared about the breathy sighs and endearments late at night. 

But slowly things changed. Families of soldiers started to disappear. Letters stopped arriving. The endless uncertainty and terrible things, impossible to forget, started to take their toll. Arguments broke out. Decisions began to be made that Harry couldn’t approve of. 

‘We have to win, first.’ They said, ‘Then we’ll have a new world. Until then we have to do anything that will work. Even if it’s cruel.’

‘But then how will we be different to them?’ Karen had demanded.

Gradually many of the original members of the group were killed or captured or left to look for families held hostage. They were replaced by brutalised men who had already lost everything, including the idealism which Karen still clung to.

Seeing her, seeing her holding fast to what they had abandoned, made them angry. But Harry didn’t understand that until it was too late. 

They had survived another skirmish so were drinking, in ‘celebration’, but the news from further north was so bad that there wasn’t any real relief in it. The more they drank, holed up in a barn somewhere or other, the more the atmosphere darkened but Harry didn’t see it at first because his mind was full of the face of the young fascist soldier he had shot through the eye that afternoon. 

So much blood. So much pain.

Harry swallowed another drink and staggered up to get his next one. He could just make out the sound of Karen arguing with someone nearby, telling them that they had lost their way, that a new world couldn’t be made on the back of horrors, that burning villages wasn’t war, and it made Harry feel a little better that at least someone was standing up for decency.

Outside by the wine barrel he swayed a little and as he watched the stars reeling, he made a decision. He would walk into that barn and take Karen by the arm and say, “We’re going home.”

But then someone hit him on the back of the head and the world went away.

When he came to it was to the sound of screaming.

He knew that voice. He knew it in laughter and sadness. He knew it tired and lost. He knew it passionate with love. It washis voice. It was part of him.

And it was screaming.

 

Harry stopped. He was breathing too fast. This was always when his conscious mind shut down. It refused to let him remember further. Unless he was dreaming, when it spared no detail. 

Joseph was out of his chair and kneeling on the hearth rug, patting his hand awkwardly. 

“It’s alright,” Joseph said, “You don’t have to,”

“They were raping her. All of them. And other things. And by the time I got to her she was dying. I think to them it was just another skirmish. They didn’t care who she was or what side she was on. They didn’t care that she, that I,” Harry wanted to throw something, break something, make something pay.

Joseph sat back on his heels. Waited.

“I killed them.” Harry said eventually, “I burned down the barn. I burned down the farm next to it, although they had had nothing to do with it. I spent the next week in a...an orgy of rage. I wasn’t a person. I had no pity. I did things that I...that can’t be forgiven. In the course of them someone fought back and took my eye and I ended up in a field hospital where they identified me as English and I was brought home. To the sanatorium. Where I met you. No one there knew what I did in Spain. The country was a tragedy by then. How could they identify the crimes of a madman in the midst of all that? So with nothing else to go on the doctors in England decided I had shellshock.”

Joseph breathed out, shakily.

“So,” Harry told him, “I’m an incestuous murderer. Still think you don’t regret our friendship?”

Joseph didn’t speak for a long time.

Then, “Seems to me,” he said slowly. “That if I loved someone and someone did that to her, that I might go mad too.”

Harry looked up. “Really? You still want to know me?”

“It’s not all a total surprise, mate.” Joseph said, with a grim smile. “You talk in your sleep and the walls are thin. I had pieces. There’s only one thing I don’t know.”

Harry was watching Joseph, awed. “What’s that?”

“Why now, why tell me now, after three years?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe because I’m afraid it’ll happen again. That I am growing to...feel that level of emotion for someone and what if,”

“But you don’t know any girls! You never even...I’m the only person who...Wait a minute! Bloody hell, tell me it’s not me!” Joseph blurted, eyes wild with dread.

Harry couldn’t help it, he burst out laughing until tears ran down his face. His body shook. After an initial expression of relief Joseph started to look a bit offended. 

“It’s not that unlikely!”

“Sorry,” Harry wheezed, wiping his eyes, “I just...no, Joseph. I don’t feel that way about you.”

“Humph. Men ‘ave tried it on with me before, you know and I can’t blame them, I’m awful pretty. Who is she then? I thought you didn’t know any girls.”

“I don’t.”

“Oh...oh. It’s Korbett then?” 

“I’m afraid so.”

“You have been looking at him funny,” Joseph remarked, standing up and going back to his chair. “You’re a rum one, Harry, and no mistake. Going for a man like ‘im. I reckon he needs a good kicking.”

“Joseph...” Harry marvelled, head spinning from the storm of emotions in his chest, “You aren’t reacting as I thought you would.”

“Well, let me see,” Joseph started ticking things off on his fingers, face raw, eyes suddenly hard, “One- Incest- my brother did that. With my step mother. And I still love ‘im, wherever he is. He was only trying to get her happy enough so she would stop trying to put me ‘ead through the wall. You, on the other hand, it sounds like love and I can’t hate you for loving someone. Two- Killing people- my dad used to wake up screaming after Ypres and babbling about all the young German soldiers he had shot. That was before he got sent back to the front and died. Three- Being queer- well, I won’t say what queers do don’t make me sickly but I like sex. I’m ‘ardly going to tell anyone else they shouldn’t have sex. Sex is great. But p’sonally, I think sex with girls is better.”

Harry’s mouth was dry by the end of that.

“Joseph, your step mother... So the scars weren’t from a childhood accident like you said, because she was drunk? She did it on purpose? She often beat you?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. The past should stay where it is.”

Harry slumped. In one twenty minute conversation he felt like he had run a thousand miles. 

But the relief.

Joseph knew. Joseph knew and he was still here. 

There was a long silence. They both had a lot to think about. Somewhere down the hall Samuel could be heard demanding to know the whereabouts of a bottle of ginger ale that had apparently never made it to the kitchen. Gareth suggested that a pigeon might have flown off with it.

“So, you’re worried that being sweet on Samuel (you’re barmy, by the way) will end up with you going round killing people?” Joseph summarised, bluntly.

Harry winced. “I suppose so, yes. Maybe I should be on my own. So I can keep control.”

“Hmm...” Joseph said, obviously doubtful. “I don’t think life works like that.”

Harry opened his mouth to reply but the dinner gong went and he realised that he hadn’t even washed his face, let alone changed. 

A thin smile crept onto Joseph’s face. “I don’t know about you but after a chat like that I need a drink!”

“Yes,” Harry felt himself packing up the past and shoving it gratefully away into its usual box, felt the superficial calm descend over his face again, “And I’m hungry.”

“Let’s hope Gareth lets us have some grub.” Joseph stood up, stretched, and turned to go. “Oh, and Harry?” 

“Yes?”

“I told you I wouldn’t regret it.”

 

Dinner was surreal. Harry kept sneaking looks at Joseph, queasily fearing that it would all sink in and Joseph would turn his back on him after all. Had their roles been reversed Harry might well have wondered what kind of friend he had got himself lumbered with. One which blurted out horrors without so much as a prologue. One who lay with his own sister. One who burnt Spanish villages to the ground.

‘Why now?’ Harry asked himself, just as Joseph had, ‘Why so suddenly to confess all, to risk our friendship, which means so much to me, in the selfish need to unburden myself?’

Harry had been raised not to speak of things which couldn’t be helped, for what was the value of it? What could be gained from wallowing in the past?

But then, on the fourth or fifth anxious glance, Joseph caught his eye and smiled kindly, tolerantly, so that Harry knew that not only had Joseph told the entire truth when he said that he didn’t regret their friendship, but that Joseph knew what Harry was thinking, knew that he needed reassurance and would give it as often as it took. 

A lump rose up in Harry’s throat which prevented him from managing his desert.

Fortunately it didn’t go to waste because Gareth nobly took on the responsibility. 

“You alright?” The young man enquired, round a mouthful of food, “You’re all quiet and your eyes ‘ave that look, that one some of the flyers get right before they start crying or yellin’ and say they won’t go up in their planes no more.”

A spoon, thrown with vicious accuracy, pinged off Gareth’s forehead before Harry could gather his wits to reply. 

“Apologise, now,” Samuel growled. His eyes looked capable of melting steel girders. 

Gareth reddened, “I didn’t mean nothing by it.” He turned to Harry, “’m sorry. I just thought you looked right twitchy.”

“Never mind,” Harry said, hastily, because Samuel looked about to reach for another spoon, “I’m only tired. Joseph and I have been on duty six days a week for a long while now. Perhaps I’m...overwrought.”

“Eh?” Gareth queried.

“Well, you know that feeling where it’s as though you’re stretched too far and might unravel?” Harry tried.

“Oh,” comprehension flooded Gareth’s face, “That. Yeah. That’s a bugger when that ‘appens.”

Which language sadly resulted in another airborne spoon. 

It wasn’t hard to work out why Samuel had survived so much longer than most fighter pilots, if he was half as dangerous with a plane as he was with cutlery.

 

After dinner, which had been the best and biggest meal any of them had had in a long while, they repaired to the drawing room. Gareth and Joseph immediately located a pack of cards (and the gin) and settled down to a cheerfully acrimonious game of poker punctuated by laughter and occasional accusations of cheating. 

Samuel unfolded a newspaper and Harry sat down nearby, pretending to read a book but really enjoying the evening breeze coming through the open French doors and regular furtive glances at Samuel.

He really was beautiful. As no man had any right to be. Harry found himself fascinated by the line of Samuel’s jaw, the way the lamp light played on his hair, the dip of collarbone which could just be seen where the August heat had encouraged him to unbutton his shirt a little. 

Looking at Samuel made Harry aware of his eye as a possible disfigurement. He had no vanity and had never cared about the injury in terms of what it might have done to his appearance. Until now he had never cared whether he was handsome or not. He hadn’t needed to be. 

‘And you don’t need to be now,’ he reminded himself, firmly, shocked at the lack of discipline in his thoughts, the lack of consistency, when it came to Samuel, ‘Because you’ve already decided that it would be best if he doesn’t want you. If your eye makes him hesitate to act then that would be just as well.’

And all of the time Harry was thinking this, telling himself this, he was still looking at Samuel’s face, his mouth, his thin wrists emerging from his shirt sleeves.

And aching.

“I think I’ll take a turn on the lawn,” Harry blurted, standing up hastily. “Walk off that dinner a little.”

Joseph waved vaguely and then won another farthing from an outraged Gareth, cackling evilly. 

Samuel only looked up from his newspaper, held Harry’s gaze for a moment, and then looked down again.

The cool outside was welcome because Harry was sure he was blushing in a way he hadn’t since school. This was ridiculous. He was behaving like a moony girl over a man he barely knew. He couldn’t seem to keep his thoughts and desires in order for more than two minutes together and now he had fled a drawing room as if a devil sat there, tempting him.

It was a perfect evening though. The trees moved gently, soothingly, at the edge of the lawn. The grass felt nice beneath his feet, a pleasant change from broken cobbles. The air smelt of plants and flowers and that strange, indefinable, energythat roams the countryside at night in summer. As if anything could happen. As if it was waiting. 

Karen had liked to make love outdoors on nights like this.

Sighing, Harry leaned back against the wall of the house, having walked a circuit of the lawn, and closed his eyes. Here in the dark the world was still. No bombs, no fires, no war. 

“Harry...” the voice was quiet as though aware that he would startle otherwise but he startled anyway.

Opening his eyes he could just make out Samuel’s face. His expression was unreadable.

“I’m sorry, have I been gone too long? How rude of me,” Harry began, aware that, as so often with Samuel, he was babbling. “Do you need me to tell Joseph to not take all of Gareth’s money? Joseph can get a little carried away with cards. I’ll talk to him.”

Samuel snorted. “Don’t bother. It’ll do Gareth good. Teach him not to play next time.”

“Oh.” 

They stood in awkward silence for a moment.

“You’ve been watching me,” Samuel remarked.

Harry panicked inwardly and smiled outwardly, as was his way. “Well, you’re...er...very interesting. Ha ha.”

“Really. Interesting, am I?” Samuel smiled in a way that was a little frightening. “The way your friend was interesting at dinner?”

“What on earth do you...oh, Joseph?”

“You kept staring at him too,” there was an edge to Samuel’s voice which made Harry’s heart begin to pound.

“Yes, but for a different reason. Joseph and I had a...chat earlier. I told him some things and I was afraid that I had lowered his opinion of me.”

“You told him you’re queer,” Samuel nodded.

“And other things.”

“Humph. So you two aren’t....?”

“No! I mean, no, we aren’t.” Harry felt his face heating again and was glad that the night time was probably hiding it. 

“Well, it’s not my business,” Samuel said, briskly, reaching for a cigarette. 

But Harry was undone by the relief in Samuel’s voice, only mostly hidden.

Thoughtlessly he reached out and took hold of Samuel’s wrist, stopping him. Samuel’s eyes snapped to his face and he tensed.

‘How warm his skin is,’ Harry thought. He had expected Samuel’s skin to be cool, perhaps thinking that Samuel wasn’t quite human. Too pale and dangerously lovely to be real.

And then Samuel had wrenched his hand away and was moving, forward, his left hand tangling in the hair at the nape of Harry’s neck, sending a shiver of pure excitement right down his spine, and his right cupping Harry’s jaw, tilting his head.

“Stop me,” Samuel said, intently.

“I can’t.”

Samuel kissed him, hard, harder than Harry had ever been kissed. 

And Harry kissed back, with a desperate sound in the back of his throat, his hands digging into Samuel’s hair. Warm, hungry kisses, bodies hardening rapidly, an almost gleeful retreat from caution and self control so that Harry stopped thinking, stopped worrying, stopped dreading the consequences of this madness and just felt. 

It was good to be alive again.

He had missed it.


	4. Chapter 4

Samuel tasted of smoke.

Harry was only distantly aware of the rough surface of the wall behind him as he was pushed back, because the world had collapsed down to hunger. There was little else that he was conscious of apart from Samuel’s body. 

Samuel’s mouth.

Samuel’s breath.

Samuel.

Harry found that he had already wrapped his legs around Samuel’s waist, thoughtlessly. Like a whore. Except that what ought to be shameful, this loss of dignity, of control, didn’t feel shameful, didn’t feel whoreish. It felt good in ten dozen ways. It felt good right through his skin and bone. 

He was more aroused than he could remember being in a very long time. 

When Samuel yanked his head to one side and bit his throat, Harry moaned.

And then somewhere nearby a door closed.

And they both froze.

Cold drenched the fire and Harry strained to hear someone approaching or someone going away. Had someone seen them? Someone unfriendly? What had they both been thinking, giving way to lust, out in the open, on a bright starry night? 

When there was no further sound Samuel eventually let Harry down.

Harry stood there, uncertain how to proceed, and waited for a sign, a clue, as to what would happen next. He knew what he wanted. He couldn’t delude himself that the interruption had been a blessing or had in some way saved him from himself, because he had every intention of continuing this in a more private setting as soon as they got a chance. 

Now that it had started there was no turning back.

Assuming that Samuel wanted it too. As the silence stretched on and Samuel said nothing, Harry began to panic. Maybe Samuel only kissed him because it was pleasurable and it was a beautiful night, and they were both randy. There had been a taste of gin in Samuel’s mouth. Maybe...

“Stop that,” Samuel sighed, reaching for his forgotten cigarette and finally lighting up.

“Stop what?” Harry asked. His voice sounded hoarse. It often did. Too many fires, too much smoke and dust. Even here in the country, in this idyllic setting, he couldn’t escape the war. He had brought it with him, in the back of his throat, deep in his skin. 

“The thinking. You’re always thinking. That first night in that god awful pub I felt exhausted just watching you think.”

Harry managed a smile, although it felt rather frantic on his mouth. “I was just wondering if you, I mean, if we...er...”

Samuel reached out suddenly with the hand not holding a cigarette and ran a finger slowly along Harry’s lower lip.

Harry shuddered.

Samuel took another drag, the glowing end of the cigarette catching in his unsmiling eyes, then ground it out, half smoked, on the pavement. 

He stepped forward again.

Harry’s heart leapt.

“Oy! Korbett! Where’s the rest of the gin, you tight bastard?”

Harry loved Joseph. He really did. 

But right then he could have cheerfully killed him.

 

They went back to the drawing room to find Joseph riffling through the sideboard looking for more booze and Gareth full of indignation at having lost no less than five shillings at cards. 

Harry immediately retreated to a dimmer part of the room, furthest from the lamps, because he felt sure that his face showed what had happened. He thought that he might as well have a big sign over his head screaming, ‘AROUSED! FRUSTRATED! QUEER!’ and somehow he wasn’t at all sure how he felt about Gareth in particular working out what Harry and Samuel had been up to. It was possible that Gareth would react badly to someone interfering with his hero. 

Samuel went straight to a cabinet and pulled a bottle out of it, thrusting it at Joseph and saying, “Here is my gin, you ill-bred oaf. Now stop shouting in my drawing room.”

Joseph merely grinned victoriously and poured them all another drink.

“Samuel, he took my money!” Gareth complained, glaring at Joseph. “He must have cheated. He was smiling like he was cheatin’!” 

“What exactly is a ‘cheating smile’?” Samuel enquired, coolly, before settling into an armchair and taking out his newspaper. Perhaps only Harry saw the almost imperceptible shake of Samuel’s hands. 

“Well, like this,” Gareth told him, and then twisted his mouth into a grin of which a church gargoyle would be proud.

Samuel glanced at it, sighed, returned his gaze to his newspaper and merely remarked, “That is the smile of a man who knows he’s met someone stupid enough to bet. You absolutely deserve to lose your money. I hope you avoid temptation next time. Or,” a slight smile, “at least cheat better than he does.”

Gareth crossed his arms and humphed, clearly disgusted.

“Never mind, brat,” Joseph gave Gareth a gin and a friendly cuff to the ear, “Who knows? Maybe you’ll win it all back tomorrow.”

‘Unlikely’, Harry thought, remembering Joseph’s track record in this area. There had been times in Joseph’s life when he had earned his living from cards and Harry had never seen him lose. He had also never seen Joseph cheat and it spoke of Joseph’s liking for Gareth that he hadn’t taken offence at the accusation.

Gareth sat down with his drink, grumbling to himself. 

Harry looked at the clock on the mantel. Eleven o clock. It wouldn’t be suspicious if he went to bed now, would it? And maybe Samuel might...

Harry swallowed.

This was madness. He knew a lot about madness and this was certainly it. What was more he was still wondering who had closed that door and if they had seen them kissing. Every newspaper report of every homosexual caught, publicly disgraced and sent to prison, danced through Harry’s mind. Lives were ruined that way. Families destroyed, careers ended. He knew he shouldn’t read about such men, but like most queers he couldn’t help it. He was drawn to such cases with a sick compulsion, full of pity but thinking selfishly all the time, ‘I hope this never happens to me.’ 

Until now there had been no chance of it happening either, because there had been no one in Harry’s life, male or female, whom Harry wanted since Spain. 

Now, however, there was.

“Well,” He said, yawning, “I think I’ll get an early night. It was a long drive down.”

“Watch out for ghosts,” Gareth said, solemnly. “I was talkin’ to the footman in the kitchen and he said there is ghosts in the ‘ouse! There’s a monk what walks up and down the gallery. And a wailing woman!”

“I like the sound of the second one,” Joseph smirked.

“Eh?” Gareth frowned.

Samuel shot a warning glance at Joseph which Joseph, unwisely in Harry’s opinion, chose to disregard. 

“I mean, young Gareth, that there is usually a wailing woman or two, when I’m around,” Joseph told him, waggling his eyebrows meaningfully. To his obvious delight Gareth started blushing. “What’s wrong, lad? Don’t you know your way round the lasses yet?”

“I...er...I...they get all shy round me,” Gareth blurted, “Mostly they just make moony eyes at Samuel until he’s rude to ‘em.”

“Well that’s your chance! You should move in and comfort them!” Joseph laughed.

Gareth went even redder but Harry could see him storing this suggestion away for later consideration. 

“What should I say to ‘em? What would you say?” Gareth asked, reluctance in his tone but curiosity on his pink face. 

“It’s not what I say but what I do,” Joseph leered.

There was a strange, silver, noise and then Joseph was picking up the spoon which had just bounced off his forehead. Harry hadn’t even seen Samuel move.

“Did you...did you just throw a spoon at me?” Joseph demanded, eyes wide.

“Yes, indeed I did,” Samuel said, turning a page, “And I must ask that you cease your attempts to educate Gareth since no good can come of it.”

“Did you have a spoon in your pocket, all evening?” Joseph asked, anger warring with the beginnings of laughter in his voice. Joseph was rarely far from laughter.

Samuel straightened his newspaper with a snap. “A good host should be prepared with anything his guests might need. That includes when they need a spoon thrown at them.”

Joseph stared for a long moment and then started chuckling. “You’re a nutjob,” He concluded.

“Possibly,” Samuel shrugged.

Harry, thinking himself forgotten, began to sidle towards the door. 

Except that he hadn’t been forgotten. 

“Good night,” Samuel said, looking up from his paper for a moment, “Sleep well.”

Harry’s heart started pounding again.

“G...good night!” he replied, too loudly.

And then he cringed all the way up the stairs. His eagerness outside had been shocking. What must Samuel think of him?

 

There was an eerie silence on the upper floors which made it all too easy to believe in ghosts. This wasn’t of huge concern to Harry since he lived with so many already, but he had to admit to a little shiver when he glanced up on getting into bed and could have sworn that there was an extra shadow by the wardrobe. 

He steeled himself not to be so foolish and lay, staring at the canopy, wondering what would happen in London to all the souls being lost in fire and rubble. In future years would the city be plagued by a thousand ghosts, walking streets that no longer existed, searching for houses long since reduced to dust? If ghosts were bound to the places they knew in life then what would it mean in the cities, which were being remade?

Was Karen wandering Spain?

Guilt swamped him. He had forgotten her in Samuel’s arms. It had been as though she had never existed. It was only for a moment but it felt like betrayal. Worse, he desired Samuel as much as he had ever desired her and that had never happened before. Until now Karen was the only person he had felt like that for. Would she be hurt if she knew?

With a growl of exasperation at his own morbid thoughts he turned over and pressed his face into the pillow. 

Don’t think about it don’t think about it don’t think about it...

 

Half an hour later he heard the others going to bed, heard Joseph talking to one of the maids, her delighted laugh brightening the night time corridors, and was just dropping off when there was a knock at the door. His blood leapt but he reminded himself that it could be Joseph asking for a prophylactic. Joseph often ran out and Harry, as a conscientious friend, always made a point of having some to lend. It wouldn’t do to get a girl into trouble.

Harry climbed out of the bed and padded across the creaky wooden floor. 

The door opened to reveal Samuel, as in Harry’s heart he had known it would. Harry smiled, couldn’t stop smiling but wished he could because he suspected that the smile was a little forced.

“Did I wake you?” Samuel asked, he kept shifting his weight on the soles of his feet in a way that would have been nervous on anyone else. 

“No, please come in.” Harry stood aside, trying hard not to touch Samuel until he was certain why Samuel was here. There could be many reasons. He might want to apologise or say it mustn’t happen again.

Samuel strode in and went at once to the window, which he closed. 

‘He doesn’t want to be overheard,’ Harry thought.

“I would have come earlier but I found that the housekeeper had put Gareth in a servant’s bedroom.” Samuel glared at no one in particular. “I’m not having one of my guests be insulted.”

“And certainly not Gareth,” Harry said, without thinking.

Samuel’s eyes narrowed, “What do you mean by that?” 

“Er...Just that you seem to be good friends.” Harry replied, hastily. 

“And why shouldn’t we be?” Samuel demanded.

Harry started to panic. “No reason at all why you shouldn’t be!”

Samuel slumped abruptly and sat wearily on a chair by the unlit fireplace. “There are many reasons not to be friends with Gareth. He’s infuriating. He has a need for food stamps that almost amounts to a fetish. He never stops talking. Those are good reasons. However,” Samuel gave Harry a grim smile. “The housekeeper and everyone else has other reasons. His class, his education, or lack thereof. Stupid bloody reasons.”

Harry, relaxing slightly, settled himself into the chair opposite Samuel’s. “The war has changed everything except the way we all think. I can’t help picturing the expression on my mother’s face if she had lived to see my friendship with Joseph. I went to Oxford and my father was an ambassador and now I’m all but living with a companion who left school at thirteen. My mother was a good woman but she would have been bewildered. It’s asking a lot for people to throw away everything they believe about who they are and where they stand.”

“Well, I’ve left my housekeeper in no doubt as to where Gareth stands, and that he’s to be treated with the same respect as any other guest.”

Harry hid a smile because Samuel’s own treatment of his guests was hardly beyond reproach. Spoons, for example...

There was a long awkward silence then, during which Harry thought he heard the maid laughing again from the general direction of Joseph’s room. For a moment, and not for the first time, Harry envied Joseph. No one would ever arrest Joseph for following his romantic inclinations. No one would ever drive him from all respectable society (not that respectable society had much time for Joseph now) simply because his lover was of a particular gender. 

Joseph would never have to worry obsessively about who closed a door on a warm summer’s evening and what they might have seen before doing so.

“We lost our heads rather, didn’t we?” He said at last.

Samuel’s mouth tilted at the corner, “We were lucky. Anyone could have come along. It’s a short cut for the servants in summer, between the dining room and the drawing room.”

“I can’t think what came over us,” Harry said, nervously.

Samuel’s smile broadened but it was anything but merry. “Can’t you?”

Harry realised to his mortification that he was blushing darker than Gareth had done. “Well, obviously I...want you. That’s been painfully obvious.”

“Yes. And?”

“And, what?”

Samuel stood up, pulled his shirt over his head and held out a hand, “What’s so terrible about that? What’s making you hold back?”

Harry let his eyes travel over skin and flesh while heat flooded his belly. 

He stood up. 

“Nothing,” he said.

And took Samuel’s hand.


	5. Chapter 5

To his chagrin Harry realised that he was shaking, partly from anticipation, partly from nerves and partly (mostly) from the sort of arousal where the blood seems to be boiling in one’s veins. Samuel, despite his beauty, was entirely masculine, his body muscled and lean, hard in the right places and he was half naked in Harry’s bedroom, holding out a hand.

Somehow Samuel was contriving to do so as if it was all the same to him whether Harry took it or not, but the heat in those impossible eyes showed that his air of studied indifference was a lie.

So, Harry took it.

There was no further speaking after that and Harry was glad of it because if there were no words there could be no concealment, no half truths, no feeling that he ought to warn Samuel what he was getting himself into by going to bed with him. Besides, Harry wasn’t sure he could make words right now.

Not when they lay down together on the bed and dived back into kissing as though the hour since their last kiss hadn’t happened. As if the time since had been only between one breath and the next. 

All Harry could think was ’his mouth is so hot, he’s so hard against my hip, I want him to fuck me, please, I know I don’t deserve it God, but please let him fuck me...’

Samuel tugged impatiently at Harry’s pyjamas and Harry, who had somehow ended up on his back during the kiss, lifted his hips obediently. To distract himself from the self consciousness of being suddenly naked in front of this man, to stop himself wondering what Samuel would make of his scars, Harry reached out and returned the favour. He undressed Samuel with shaking hands while Samuel bit gently at the side of his neck.

Samuel seemed to like biting Harry’s neck.

Harry liked that he liked it.

He wanted Samuel to mark him everywhere, to sink his teeth in and not let go, to make Harry his for always. Samuel was very, very hard and the sound he made when Harry wrapped a hand around him and started stroking, was a good sound. It was something between a gasp and a moan but Samuel stifled it all too soon. Harry hid a smile, stroked harder. He might have known that Samuel would be proudly quiet in pleasure. Harry considered that a very interesting challenge. He pushed Samuel gently onto his back, too quickly for Samuel to object, and licked his way down his skin. 

Licked Samuel’s small, hard nipples, which tasted a little of soap. 

Licked Samuel’s belly, which was firm and rippled and not without scars of its own, Harry discovered. 

Harry held Samuel’s hips, sharp and hot in his grip, and buried his nose in wiry, slightly wet hair. This time the sound was even closer to a moan and the bit down silencing came later. Samuel was losing control over himself. Something tingled in the pit of Harry’s soul. A determination to give Samuel bliss, to be unprecedented. So that Samuel would never forget him. So that Samuel would have to come back for more. Harry ran his tongue slowly up Samuel’s erection, earning a shudder and the rather marvellous sensation of hips straining against Harry’s hands. Harry forced down a triumphant grin and opened his mouth.

It felt...Harry hardly knew what he felt, only that he wanted more, only that the hot hardness in his mouth tasted good and that he was so much harder than he could ever remember being. So he was disappointed when Samuel dug fingers into his hair and dragged him up. Harry found himself sprawled on top of him, Samuel staring at him with eyes which seemed all pupil. 

Samuel had apparently decided to regain control of the situation.

Harry was suddenly flat on his back and his legs were being spread. He probably couldn’t stop this now, even if he wanted to, and he was ashamed that that knowledge should send such a spike of excitement into his belly. 

Samuel was stroking and teasing and then there was pain from Samuel’s fingers. Harry had forgotten about the pain and truly didn’t care. 

This man would be worth any amount of pain.

Fortunately, despite appearances, Samuel didn’t enjoy hurting people because he saw the discomfort in Harry’s face and immediately got up, went to the bathroom and came back with hair oil. While he was gone Harry made a point of not thinking, panic was too near. Panic at what a risk he was taking and, although Samuel didn’t know it, what a risk he was taking too.

’If he knew my history he wouldn’t want me. I can’t expect anyone else to take it as well as Joseph did...’

Samuel’s long fingers were slick now and Harry moaned. Unlike Samuel he felt no need to hold back his reactions. He wanted Samuel to know how much he liked it. Samuel’s fingers burrowed deep, remorselessly, and Harry dug his hands into the pillow beneath his head, squirming with pleasure as it overwhelmed the pain. Samuel was breathing fast. He bent his head and kissed Harry hard, thrusting his fingers so that Harry cried out into Samuel’s mouth. 

At that Samuel growled something unintelligible and pulled his fingers away. 

He knelt between Harry’s parted thighs, and just looked down at him for a moment. Harry realised that this was Samuel asking for a yes so he nodded, vehemently. Samuel looked like he might laugh and that made Harry grin too. For a handful of heartbeats they did nothing but smile at each other.

Then Samuel entered him.

And it was just as well that he had the presence of mind to slap a hand over Harry’s mouth because Harry’s cry was loud and the night was quiet.

‘Breathe...’ Harry told himself, ‘it will pass. It will be worth it.’

Samuel distracted him with kisses.

And then Samuel’s oiled fingers on Harry’s erection.

And Samuel’s tongue on Harry’s nipple.

Soon Samuel could thrust without Harry whimpering, or at least without bad whimpering. Harry rode the adrenaline each time he was penetrated, winded by shock. Such pleasure. Not gentle, loving pleasure as with Karen, but hard, raw, undeniable, visceral sensation which flooded through him every time Samuel moved. Harry couldn’t even work out where it was coming from anymore because it was everywhere.

He wanted to beg to be allowed to climax but he had lost all his words.

Samuel fucked him hard.

And long.

Forever.

 

Harry came round and discovered that he was in Samuel’s arms.

He looked up at him. Samuel was watching him, almost warily. 

“Did I faint?” Harry asked, horror struck and embarrassed. He couldn’t remember. All he could remember was a climax so intense that he had turned his head and sobbed into the pillow. 

“To some extent,” Samuel told him, wryly. “I’m taking it as a compliment.”

Harry smiled, blushing. 

Samuel kissed him. “How can you blush after all that?” He asked, when the kiss was over.

Harry chuckled, ruefully, “What can I say? I’m a well bought up boy.”

Samuel smirked and ran a hand down between Harry’s legs, still wantonly splayed, and said, “Really? Do well bought up boys have another man’s spend inside them?”

Harry shuddered as a wave of blissfully dirty pleasure went through him at Samuel’s words.

Samuel’s fingers exploring him had something to do with that too.

“You’re very tight,” Samuel remarked, his tone almost observational, but Harry noticed him getting hard again. “Has it being a long time?”

Harry hesitated, “Yes, a long time. I haven’t been with a man since school.”

“When was that? How old are you?” 

“I’m twenty two.”

Samuel paused, surprise obvious. “You look and act older than that.” He said, bluntly.

“I know.”

Harry didn’t want to be having this conversation. So he pulled Samuel up and back into him. 

 

By the time they fell asleep they were past exhausted so they didn’t wake until Joseph banged on the door and called, “Oy, Harry, breakfast! Hurry up or Gareth’ll ‘ave the lot. And you haven’t seen that bastard Samuel, ‘ave you? The servants can’t find him.”

Harry was intensely grateful for what was transparently a coded warning that the servants had noticed Samuel’s absence from his room and they had better get dressed and respectable right now, before people started searching.

They scrambled into clothes and listened until the hallway was silent. 

Easing the door open Samuel looked out. “Coast is clear,” He said.

Harry braced himself for Samuel leaving. 

But before he did, he turned and cupped Harry’s chin, looked into his face and said, “When we get back to London, I expect to see you again.”

“Yes,” Harry breathed, swamped by relief. Not a one night affair then. Thank God...

Samuel bent his head and licked Harry’s lower lip and somehow there was a claim in it that hadn’t been in the fucking the night before. A warning almost, that Harry was now to consider himself part of Samuel’s world. 

In what capacity, remained to be seen.

 

Joseph was stoically avoiding Samuel’s eye (and the occasional spoon) although he did glare a little when he saw Harry wince on sitting down. 

As Gareth prattled on about how they were real sausages and had Samuel realised that they were real sausages, Joseph leaned over and whispered,

“Did that posh bastard hurt you, Harry?”

“No,” Harry whispered back, hastily, “No...I’m very happy.”

“Humph,” Joseph replied, doubtfully. “He doesn’t deserve you, that’s all I’m sayin’.”

‘No,’ Harry thought, remembering Spain and remembering how he’d had to let Samuel see him take his glass eye out before they fell asleep, because one mustn’t sleep with it in, and that Samuel had had to watch him put it back in the empty socket that morning. ‘No, he doesn’t deserve me.’

‘He deserves better.’

 

They spent the next few hours in the garden, drinking ginger beer and listening to the birds sing while Joseph smirked at a very satisfied and sated looking housemaid, Gareth read old copies of The Beano found under a bed in the long disused nursery, Samuel himself dozed on the grass and Harry replayed the night in his mind.

Again and again.

And again.

 

Time passed all too quickly and before it seemed possible they had lunched and were in the car again. Harry felt as though everything in the house had been in a dream and only the car was real, as he drove the apparently endless miles towards London, and Joseph and Gareth squabbled in the back. Samuel was wordless, except for regularly snapping at Gareth or Joseph, but now and then their eyes would meet and Harry could see Samuel remembering.

The recollection of pleasure seemed to vibrate between them.

Sometimes it was all Harry could do to not pull the car over and fall upon him.

 

London somehow seemed more believable than Devon had been. The smoke and dirt, the wire and rubble, the craters and still burning fires from last night’s raid, more real than trees, and grass, and bed with Samuel in it. Harry felt himself shifting back into the constant knowledge that death could be just round the corner or a single siren away. Even Gareth went quiet.

They stopped outside Samuel’s West End apartment in an expensive building. Joseph whistled with reluctant envy. 

“Nice place, doorman and everything...”

Samuel shrugged as if to say, ‘doesn’t every gentleman live like this?’

Harry hoped that Samuel would never see the state of his own accommodation. 

Gareth tumbled out of the car and mumbled something about going up to see if there was any post. ‘Do they live together then?’ Harry thought, uncomfortably. 

Samuel stood on the pavement stretching and yawning, oblivious to Harry’s suddenly narrow stare. 

’Do they live together?’

“Come on, Harry old thing. Can’t stand around here all day. We’re on duty in two hours,” Joseph poked Harry in the arm and Harry pulled himself together.

“Ha ha, yes. I’m sorry, Joseph,” and they turned to leave, heading in the direction of the underground but Gareth’s anxious voice stopped them.

“Samuel, you’ve...you’ve got a telegram.”

They all froze. Telegram. Bringer of horrors. A single, innocuous looking delivery which in these days of war often contained such despair for so many. Bald lines of official notification about loved ones. The snatching away of family and husbands, brothers and sons. In a few inches of banal type.

Lost in action.

Missing in Europe.

They all watched as Samuel snatched the envelope and ripped it open. 

Samuel went white.

Harry thoughtlessly reached out and touched Samuel’s arm. “Is it...?” he tried.

“No,” Samuel hissed, voice pitched only for him, although Harry could feel Gareth and Joseph watching them. Particularly Gareth. Harry dropped his hand from Samuel’s arm. “It’s worse.” Samuel titled the paper so that Harry, and only Harry, could see.

Dear Mr Korbett. Stop. Greetings from Devon. Stop. I’m so glad you enjoyed your weekend with your young friend so much. Stop. I think you might have forgotten to give me something. Stop. Something important. Stop. Perhaps we should meet to discuss it. Stop. I’ll be in touch soon. Stop.

Harry suddenly thought that he might vomit.

Because, like all queers, he had used to read about men blackmailed by people who threatened to report men like them to the police, and he had thought, ‘I hope that never happens to me.’

‘I hope that never happens to me.’


	6. Chapter 6

“What is it?” Gareth demanded. There was an edge to his voice, a hardness, which Harry had never heard there before.

“Merely some bad news from my bank,” Samuel lied, laconically.

Gareth’s eyes narrowed. Joseph also looked dubious. Such a transparent untruth fooled no one. No one sent telegrams except in extremis because of the terror they inspired in the recipient. Certainly not one’s bank. The weakness of the lie gave away Samuel’s shock even though nothing in his demeanour now indicated any concern. He was already reaching for a cigarette.

Harry wanted to touch him. Wanted to keep him safe.

Harry wanted to hurt the blackmailer. Somewhere in the back of Harry’s mind the fires were already burning.

Joseph’s hand tentatively on his arm made Harry realise that he had been stood silently, with what felt like a rictus smile on his face, for the last few moments. 

“We have to go or we’ll be late for duty,” Joseph reminded him, quietly.

Harry shook himself into his senses, or at least, what passed for them. “First we should at least help Samuel and Gareth,” they lived together, why did they live together? “carry their bags up and thank Samuel properly for a most pleasant weekend.”

Joseph glanced uncertainly at Samuel who only shrugged as though he didn’t care either way.

 

Samuel’s flat was big, tasteful, and very hot after a weekend shut up. Everyone immediately went around opening windows and Samuel went into one of the bedrooms to open the French doors onto the balcony. Harry took his chance to follow him in there, into the stifling dark cast by the blackout curtains, and pull Samuel to one side before he could stop him and kiss him. Samuel barely hesitated before kissing him back, forcefully, and turning him to slam him up against the wall. 

In some distant part of his mind Harry hoped that Joseph was having the wisdom to distract Gareth so that the boy wouldn’t wander in here.

They kissed until they couldn’t breathe then broke apart, Samuel glaring angrily. “Not here,” He said, “Not with Gareth likely to walk in at any moment.”

“Why do you live with him?” Harry demanded and even he could hear the taint of jealousy in his voice.

Samuel raised a sardonic eyebrow before turning away and opening the doors. Noise came up from the street, an outside world which Harry would rather forget. 

“We fuck a couple of times and you think you’ve the right to ask me questions?” Samuel observed.

“Yes,” Harry replied, simply. “And I could just as easily say to you that we had only fucked a couple of times when you saw fit to assume a continued association. I think we both know how fast this is moving.”

Silence. Resentful silence. 

‘What are you hiding about Gareth?’ Harry wondered.

“You will be reprimanded severely if you are late for duty.” Samuel inhaled his cigarette almost down to the butt. “And I’m sure you wouldn’t want the same to happen to Joseph, merely because he was waiting for you.” 

Harry felt anger rising up his throat and went to leave but a hand caught his shoulder and pulled him back against Samuel’s lean, hard body. Samuel latched onto the side of his neck. A shot of pure pleasure ran into Harry’s stomach.

“Come back after your shift,” Samuel breathed, full of smoke, into the side of Harry’s face. “And we’ll fuck a few more times and perhaps work out a plan for our damned blackmailer. Forget about Gareth."

“But...”

Samuel’s hand slid down to rub Harry meaningfully through his trousers. Harry bit back a moan. 

“But?” Samuel echoed.

“Nothing...” Harry gasped. “Nothing. I’ll be back in the morning.”

“Very well,” Samuel agreed. 

Harry wanted to say, ‘don’t worry,’. He wanted to say, ‘don’t be afraid,’. But Samuel would only deny being either and perhaps be insulted by the offered comfort so Harry just let his mind dissolve as Samuel undid his trousers, let them fall to the floor so that Harry felt exposed and vulnerable, stood there in broad daylight while Samuel stroked him to climax, fast and remorseless.

Harry’s knees buckled after and he nearly collapsed. Samuel’s hand had been so warm, so slick, wrapped around him. Harry had been able to feel his heart beating through his back.

Nothing ought to be like that outside of Harry’s dreams. Dreams of Karen. 

“Thought you didn’t want to risk being caught,” he panted, dazed, as Samuel grinned an unrepentant grin, and did Harry’s trousers up again. 

“Got to take our chances when we could all be blown up any day,” Samuel said.

Which didn’t answer Harry’s question at all really. Not that Harry truly cared. Samuel was confusing and compelling and Harry couldn’t resist him.

And didn’t plan to try.

Blackmailer or not.

 

Later that night Harry was drinking weak tea on a pile of rubble as they took their dinner break and trying to still the whirl of thoughts as they blew through his mind like the ash blowing through his hair. All around him was desolation but no fires were still burning so they had done their duty for now. Sometimes he felt rather useless, coming to put out fires but unable to save those already dead, those under piles of stone and tile and shattered furniture. He always felt he should be able to do more. Those joyful nights when they were able to help pull a survivor from the wreckage were few. 

Mostly it felt as though they existed only to keep London from burning to the ground for one more night.

An endless task, like painting the Forth Bridge.

“Hey up,” Joseph said, gruffly, settling himself down next to him, “Penny for ‘em.”

“I fear that you would only ask for your money back,” Harry said, wearily. 

“Come on, we’ve got no secrets now, I reckon,” Joseph smiled.

Something in Harry warmed and uncoiled. Such intense and sudden pleasure to have someone in his life who knew everything and cared for him still. Despite all. ‘I’m so lucky,’ Harry thought, ‘to have met this man.’ With all the excitement caused by Samuel, he had almost forgotten to be grateful for how well Joseph had taken the story of Harry’s life.

“Thank you for the warning this morning,” Harry told him, quietly.

“Don’t mention it. I’ve had to sneak a few lasses out of my bedroom on the sly so I know what it is when you’d better not get caught.” Joseph smirked, drinking his tea.

Harry hesitated and then decided that, yes, Joseph deserved honesty. “It may not have been enough though. That telegram...it strongly implied that someone knows about Samuel and I and wants to see what they can make of it.”

Joseph’s head snapped round, eyes blazing, “Some little creep is threatening you?”

“It’s not surprising, we’ve been reckless. We kissed in the garden, like a couple of fools and in the night I...” Harry blushed, “...I don’t think I was quiet.”

Joseph blushed a little too, at that, but mostly just looked furious. “Who is it? I’ll kick his head in!”

“We don’t know. We’ll have to wait until they contact us and name a figure. We may never know. I’ve heard of men who were blackmailed for years by people they never even met. They were told to leave money in lockers at the train station and so on.”

“Underhand, dirty little cheats,” Joseph growled. “It don’t make sense that it’s anyone else’s business what queers do in bed. Who are you hurting? I mean, it’s all kind of disgusting to my mind but Korbett is pretty, I grant you, and there have been a couple of times last twenty four hours where you looked right happy. Except that you don’t want to sit down.”

Harry couldn’t help smiling at Joseph’s bluntness. And blushing again.

“If I can help, you only ‘ave to say the word, alright?” Joseph added, clinking their tin cups together as though swearing an oath with tea, “I’ll come along and help you beat up the little perisher if you like. Not that Samuel doesn’t look like the type to do his own beating, if necessary.”

“Thank you,” Harry replied, sincerely, “But I don’t think he’d like it that I told you.”

“Happen not,” Joseph agreed. “He’s a proud one. Not to mention grumpy and dangerous with spoons. I said that you’re barmy, didn’t I?”

“Yes.”

 

Harry took a breath, dragged it in a little painfully over smoke rasped lungs, and knocked softly at Samuel’s door. His eyes were prickling with exhaustion. It had been twenty four hours since he had slept and he hadn’t managed much of it then, due to being in bed with Samuel. Yet he hadn’t even considered going home to sleep. His footsteps had brought him inexorably to Samuel’s side.

The door opened and Samuel’s eyes flickered over Harry’s dirty clothes and blackened face before standing aside and saying, “Bad night? We spent most of it in the cellar.” 

Harry walked in and all but collapsed onto a chair. 

Samuel went to the drinks cabinet and there was a clink of glasses. “Of course,” Samuel continued, as if to himself, “That’s the trouble with having a flat and not a house. Shared bomb shelter. I have to sit in the dark with old Mrs Philips talking about her brother killed in the last war, and Mr Sampson who always brings his damn cat. I’ll be glad when my leave is up and I can go back to the base. I’d rather be up there shooting Gerry down rather than down here waiting for them to drop things upon me.”

Harry smiled faintly. It was true. He couldn’t believe that Samuel reacted well to waiting. It explained his direct ways in the bedroom.

Samuel handed him a brandy in a real brandy glass and sat down opposite him. The sitting room was quiet except for the birds waking up in the trees outside. 

“Where’s Gareth?” Harry asked, too tired to beat about the bush.

“Who knows? He always vanishes after a raid. Disappears for a couple of hours.” Samuel’s tone was flat making it clear that Gareth in any form wasn’t really up for discussion.

Harry finished his brandy, starting to feel impossibly sleepy. The world began to fade in and out. 

“Come along, old chap,” a voice said, as if from far away, “Let’s get you to bed.”

Everything drifted.

 

Harry woke up mid afternoon. He opened his eyes blearily and found that Samuel was sat beside him on the bed, reading the paper. 

Harry blinked. His eye was out. But he couldn’t remember taking it out. After the brandy he had just keeled over with tiredness. 

“Ah, I see you’re back with us,” Samuel said, glancing down and then back to his paper, “Good afternoon.” 

Harry was mortified but he had to ask. “Where...where’s my eye?”

“Oh that...” Samuel said, dismissively as he turned a page, “I put it on the bedside table.”

Harry’s mortification turned to horror. Samuel had taken his eye out for him?

When he went desperately quiet for a very long time Samuel eventually looked down at him again.

“What is it?”

“You took my eye out?”

“Yes? And?”

Harry didn’t know how to put it into words, the fear of Samuel’s disgust. 

Samuel sighed a little irritably and put down the paper. “Have you quite finished asking silly questions? Because I would rather like to fuck, if it’s all the same to you.”

Harry’s mouth opened. 

Then closed again.

And then he started laughing helplessly.

 

Samuel’s dick was thrusting deep and Harry was moaning with delight and half madness at the urge to climax. Samuel was so beautiful, his naked body moving above Harry with slow, graceful power, muscled arms bracing himself either side of Harry’s head.

Harry wrapped his legs around Samuel’s back. 

He wanted it to go on forever, Samuel inside him, hard and hot, wanting Harry, taking pleasure. It was a breathtaking feeling to look up and see Samuel give himself up to it, to see him stop thinking and shed all his formidable defences, his sneers and sardonic eyebrow and his snapped retorts, just for a while. Because of Harry, because Harry had opened his legs for him.

Harry shuddered and spat release all over Samuel’s hand, making an inhuman noise as he did so, as his climax was almost torn out of him, painful in its determination. Samuel grinned down triumphantly at him as the shudders subsided and the echoes of Harry’s cry died away.

And then he pulled out, turned Harry over, and began to fuck him again.

Fast.

Harry groaned and tried to brace himself against the mattress but his sweaty hands kept slipping. Samuel ground him into the bed.

It was perfect.

As was the way Samuel gripped him, pinned him, as he emptied himself inside Harry’s body. Groaning.

It was some time after before Harry could speak. “I was loud again.”

Samuel snorted breathlessly, “Not to worry. All the neighbours are out during the day.”

Harry smiled and fell back into a haze of satiety and smug completion. His body was gleeful. It hadn’t had so much fun in years.

“Are you always loud?” Samuel asked.

“No.”

Harry could almost hear the proud smirk.

After a while Samuel went and made tea and they drank it in bed. 

Then Samuel lay down beside him and ran fingers through Harry’s hair. Their faces were close together. It was a small thing then to kiss. To kiss, slow and indulgent, in bed on an August afternoon as the world was at war, and tonight the fires would burn, and Samuel would soon be fighting in the sky and, oh yes, they were being blackmailed, but never mind because this was all that mattered. Samuel’s mouth on his, Samuel’s arms around him.

This virtual stranger.

Who wasn’t a stranger at all.

But, just as Harry was starting to hope for a re-match, the doorbell went. Samuel swore and dragged himself off the bed and threw on a dressing gown before grumbling his way to the door. 

Harry stretched and then winced and decided not to stretch again.

He was just wondering what was taking so long when Samuel stormed in and thrust a piece of paper under his nose. 

“Bastard!” Samuel hissed, “Dirty minded bastard.”

Harry took the paper and read.

Dear Mr Korbett

I hope you are well and that my telegram yesterday wasn’t too inconvenient. I see no reason why we can’t conduct our business in a clear and honest fashion. 

I am sure that you wouldn’t want your young friend Gareth to be taken back where he came from, as it’s my understanding that it’s not a very nice place, and there’s no reason that anyone should know about your relationship if you undertake to pay the necessary funds.

What filthy activities go on between adults is their business and we needn’t involve the law which I think would go particularly heavily on yourself considering the boy’s age.

To this end please leave a hundred guineas in a small portmanteau in the out of order stall of the gentleman’s toilets at King’s Cross Station on the first of September next. 

Yours

A


	7. Chapter 7

Harry stared at the letter for some time, distantly aware of the silent fury radiating from Samuel like an air raid siren, warning of approaching Armageddon. Samuel was impatient for Harry’s response, Harry knew that by the twitch of energy beside him, by the angry click of the lighter as Samuel smoked, by instinct, but Harry needed a moment to bring himself under control. 

If he spoke too soon he knew he would say something terrible.

Something like the question screaming at the front of a shamefully jealous mind. A question he had no right to ask Samuel after so short an association. 

Are you fucking him? Did you fuck him? Do you want to fuck him?

Why does he live with you?

Even if your relationship is innocent, can’t you see how that looks to outsiders? A wealthy gentleman living with a handsome working class boy? 

To be honest, Harry was surprised that Samuel didn’t get blackmailed every other week but perhaps his status as a heroic pilot had protected him until now.

Finally Harry managed to push these unworthy, unfair, questions with their hint of accusation, down, down, down to seethe and rot amongst all the other parts of him that couldn’t be seen by proper people. He turned to Samuel, grimly determined to hide his suspicion, only to catch Samuel unprepared, only to find Samuel looking at the floor, cigarette unnoticed in his hand, and the strangest, saddest look on his beautiful face.

Harry caught his breath.

Samuel started and immediately the mask came back down but Harry was already smiling so it was too late. 

Because Samuel had looked hurt.

And now Harry knew two things, without doubt. 

One, Samuel had more emotions than he let on (which, truly, wouldn’t be difficult).

Two, Samuel had never laid a finger on Gareth in that way.

Harry pulled Samuel forcibly into his arms and held him tight, ignoring the vicious struggling, ignoring Samuel’s unconvincing muttering, “I don’t need mollycoddling, you twerp,” and just hanging on like grim death until Samuel relented, grumpily, and let himself be hugged. Harry thought it funny that Samuel was blasé about the most elaborate intimacy in terms of fucking but balked now at genuine, non-sexual, comfort.

“Bastards,” Samuel muttered into Harry’s ear, a smoky curse. “How dare they.”

“Can I help?” Harry asked, risking a stroke to the hair on the nape of Samuel’s neck. 

There was a long silence, during which Harry listened to Samuel’s ferocious thoughts rattling around the head on his shoulder, and felt Samuel’s heart beating through their ribs. 

“Yes, but I’ll have to break a confidence first.” Samuel pulled back, sighed wearily, and crossed his legs, leaning against the headboard. 

Harry settled opposite him, perched amongst the tangled sheets they had so recently broken the law within, and nodded. A gentleman didn’t break a confidence lightly. It was tantamount to breaking one’s word. Too much of that and one didn’t know who one was anymore. Harry was familiar with that feeling. 

“If it’s any comfort, I will not reveal anything you tell me to anyone else. Not even Joseph,” Harry told him, earnestly.

“It’s more important that Gareth never knows that you know. He’s proud, and he’s ashamed of his past. It’s a potentially explosive combination. He’s already afraid that I’ve told you. I could see it in how he’s been looking at you.”

“Oh!” Harry reddened, “I had thought his glaring at me was because he was jealous.”

Samuel spluttered bleak laughter, “Lord no. He doesn’t feel that way about me at all,” Samuel’s face darkened, “Whatever that filthy minded blackmailer might think.”

Harry nodded, thoroughly ashamed of himself.

Samuel sighed again.

And began to speak.

 

“I was training, in the early months of the war, back when we had about three planes for every twenty pilots, and half of those were from 1918. It was a shambles. Our first ‘flights’ were on blackboards. It was weeks before any of us got up into the real thing and we barely had fuel enough for half an hour’s flight when we did get one of the damn things. So it’s not so surprising that I ended up pitching into some scrub land in north London on my first solo flight when I ran out of fuel significantly before running out of sky,” Samuel shrugged, “I wasn’t so popular with my C.O. when they had to send a lorry out to take the plane back to base. Anyway, I was just climbing out of the cockpit, (which was, inconveniently, upside down at the time) when I found a lad with eyes like saucers watching me.”

“Gareth,” Harry smiled.

“Quite. Once he saw I wasn’t hurt he thought it was fucking hilarious that I had nearly crashed my own plane without a German in sight, and so he got a thick ear for his trouble.” Samuel sighed, “Didn’t stop the little git laughing though. So I demanded he make it up to me and take me somewhere that a cup of tea might be. He just shrugged at that and then started asking questions about the plane and its engines and crawling all over the damn thing babbling on about carburettors and fuel injection mixes and god knows what. I asked where he learnt so much about planes and he said he had never seen one in his life. I asked what book he had been reading about planes. He cheerfully admitted that he couldn’t read. At which point I worked out that he just has an instinct for machines. It’s rather like he can see inside them, every working part. He works it out logically.” Samuel shook his head. “That little freak could run rings round every engineer I ever met, including the ones designing the planes. One of these days I confidently expect to wake up to find a fifty foot robot standing in the garden because Gareth got bored in the night and built it to pass the time.”

Samuel took a long drag on his cigarette and then resumed his tale. “I was thinking at once that I wanted him for my mechanic. I asked how old he was and he told me.”

Harry waited. He remembered how, the night he met Gareth, he had thought him rather young to be an RAF mechanic and suspected birth certificate doctoring to have taken place.

Samuel stubbed out his cigarette. “I’m not proud of this, alright?”

“Er...alright.”

“He’s fourteen.”

“Fourteen!” Harry was horrified.

“I know, I know,” Samuel snapped, “I know. He’s a child. He shouldn’t be anywhere near the base. He shouldn’t be in uniform. He shouldn’t be seeing the things that happen. The burning planes. The pilots carried out of crashed wreckage with their uniforms melted into their flesh. The ones who don’t come back at all. He might be on the ground crew rather than in the sky, but some nights it’s no better down there. But he wanted it. He wanted to be part of the war. You know what the boys are like. It’s so bloody hard to stop them! He said if I didn’t help him join up he would find his own way. I was afraid that if he did he really would. I thought that if I used my contacts to get him in as a mechanic that at least he wouldn’t get in some other way and maybe end up actually being sent into combat. He passes for seventeen, just about. It would be just like the silly sod to have joined up thinking he was going to play with machines and find himself a thousand feet above Kent being shot at.”

“I understand,” Harry said, although Samuel hadn’t seemed to be asking for forgiveness.

“So, I asked him about his family. I was thinking we would have to get them onside. Perhaps I was hoping they would persuade him out of it. But when I asked about his parents he went dead white and stopped talking. Eventually I got out of him that he lived in one of those god-awful orphanages, one of those borstals where they beat the crap out of them, but I knew that wasn’t all. He was obviously hiding something.”

Samuel’s eyes skittered away, as though seeking escape.

“It was months before he told me. And I’m only telling you now because I think the blackmailer must be connected to the orphanage, or how would they know his age, or what a fucking appalling place it was, so I want to go there and I want you to come with me. And if you come with me it’s possible you’ll find out because I know it’s on his file. I don’t want you to be shocked.”

“Samuel, what are...”

“His parents were brother and sister.”


	8. Chapter 8

“Harry?”

He could hear his heart beating, an irregular pulse edged by panic and he was trying to speak, to say something that a normal person would say on hearing this news, but his voice was strangled.

“It’s not his fault!” Samuel snapped suddenly, patience apparently exhausted. “You don’t have to look like it’s the end of the world!”

Harry shook his head vehemently. He wanted Samuel to understand that his horror wasn’t at Gareth’s origin but at himself, at the fact that it was probable that only Karen’s early death prevented their having a child. He wanted Samuel to understand but of course he couldn’t tell Samuel any of it.

“I’m sorry,” He managed, stung into speech by the mounting anger on Samuel’s face, “I was just shocked for a moment. Of course it’s not Gareth’s fault.”

Samuel leaned forward so that they were close, his voice dropped to a furious hiss, “The orphanage didn’t believe that. They raised him to be ashamed of it. They told him he would probably turn out to be an idiot or...or deviant. They told him he was a monster, the product of monsters. They didn’t even keep it secret from the other children and so they wouldn’t go within five miles of him. He has been totally alone for years.”

Pity for Gareth was wringing at Harry’s heart, starting to swamp his selfish focus on the ghosts this revelation had stirred up. ‘This is not my tragedy,’ he thought. ‘I’m not his father. It’s not my fault.’ Harry took Samuel’s hand and clung to it. Samuel probably had no notion how revealing his anger was of the compassion and human feeling which hid beneath layers of rock and sneer. 

It made Harry love him.

‘I love him,’ Harry thought, desperately ‘And if he ever knows my past he’ll connect it with the wrong done to Gareth and I’ll be caught in the storm of his rage. It’ll be over. He’ll never see me again without thinking it.’

“Gareth claims not to care,” Samuel told him. “He says it was like prison and he’s out now and that’s all that matters. But,” Samuel was nearly crushing Harry’s fingers, “Once a flyer clapped him on the back to thank him for something or other to do with his plane and Gareth...He said, ‘you mustn’t touch me.’ The flyer laughed it off but I cornered Gareth and demanded an answer.”

Samuel looked Harry right in the eye.

“I asked Gareth why he had said that. Gareth said, ‘Because I’m dirty. People shouldn’t touch me.’” 

Harry cringed. 

“They should have lied to him!” Samuel exclaimed, pulling out of Harry’s grasp and standing up. He went to his uniform which was hanging from the wardrobe door and began to dress. “They shouldn’t have told him about his parents. What purpose did it serve except to torment him?”

“They were sadists,” Harry said, quietly. 

“They certainly didn’t care enough about him to wonder where he disappeared to when I took him off to join up. They were glad to be rid of him I expect.” Samuel turned round, still only in his trousers. “Well, now I believe that it’s one of the orphanage staff who is blackmailing me. That reference to his age and his background. How else could anyone know it? I doctored his birth certificate but they would have the original.”

Harry nodded, dazed.

“So, are you coming with me or not? I can’t wait around here all day with you looking like a stunned mullet. I want to drive out there this afternoon.”

“Of course,” Harry scrambled off the bed and began to dress as quickly as he could. It was a relief to be moving. It gave him a purpose. It stopped him thinking. “Anything I can do to help.”

Samuel nodded brusquely and turned to grab his shirt. Harry took the chance to dart forward and kiss Samuel’s naked spine. A shiver ran up Samuel’s back and he paused for a moment.

“Poor little bastard,” Samuel said, quietly. “What a start in life, and then he gets stuck with me in the middle of a war.”

“He is lucky to have met you,” Harry said, sliding his arms around Samuel, front to back. Samuel’s skin was smooth and he smelt of clean sweat and cigarettes. “Now I understand why he has such a case of hero worship for you.”

Samuel snorted contempt at such an idea but Harry only smiled into Samuel’s shoulder.

Samuel turned in Harry’s arms and Harry was struck by the heat in his eyes. “It’s a shame that we have to go on this idiotic drive halfway across London. I would much rather have stayed in bed and fucked you all afternoon.”

Harry’s insides burned at that.

“Me too,” he replied, weakly. “I can still feel you.”

It seemed that Samuel’s candour was catching.

Samuel smiled wickedly and he turned back to his dressing.

Five minutes later he left to start the car with strict orders to not keep him waiting. 

Harry paused as he finished dressing and thought, ‘Even if I had been planning to tell him one day, about Karen, about all of it, this makes it impossible.’

‘I can never tell him now.’

 

It was hot in the car and they pushed down the windows. It felt strange somehow to be in it again after only a day but without Gareth and Joseph sniping at each other in the back seat. Samuel drove, as he knew where the orphanage was, and seemed to need some activity to burn off his anger. Harry checked his watch. He had four hours before he was on duty again.

They got lost of course. It was impossible not to these days now that landmarks and streets and whole churches could be there one day and a smoking ruin the next. The London of 1939, when Samuel had met Gareth, hardly existed any more. So it took an hour and a lot of stopping to ask directions, before they pulled up in front of a Victorian monstrosity in a poor area of tenements. The railings at the front were long gone, melted down for aircraft like all the others, but the concrete bases with their circles of rust, and the holes in the window frames, showed their former presence. Before the war it must have been a daunting place, rather like the prison which Gareth had compared it to.

Now, Harry thought, as they locked the car and climbed the steps, it just looked cold and institutional. 

And, as it turned out, empty. 

They banged on the door for some time but all was silent within. Samuel growled with frustration. 

“They must have closed it and evacuated the children,” Harry suggested.

Samuel nodded, hesitated minutely, glanced around to see if anyone was watching and then put his shoulder to the door. 

With a crunch it swung open.

Harry looked nervously about as they slipped inside, but it was hard to believe that they would get into much trouble for breaking into an abandoned orphanage. The sun was starting to drop, the bombers would come again tonight, and people had bigger things to worry about.

Inside after the glare of August heat the dark and cool was a shock. It took a moment for Harry’s eye to penetrate the gloom. The smell hit him at once though. He remembered it well from years in boarding schools. The smell of boiled food, cheap soap, old books and floor polish. It made him think of Tom, his first lover, who had had a cheeky smile, a love of Sheridan’s plays, and who had been killed at Dunkirk the previous May.

Tom’s death was one of those things which Harry, as others did, told himself he would mourn for when the war was over. There was no time now to stop and bleed for childhood friends or old school romances, not with the bombs every night, and Hitler poised just over the channel.

Or perhaps it was just that Karen had taken all his tears.

Samuel glanced about, “I wonder if they cleared out the office before they evacuated. Gareth said it was on the right, off the main entrance hall. He was in there a lot.” Samuel gave Harry a sidelong frown, “He got beaten by the headmaster very regularly.”

Harry remembered his own youthful chastisements. Most masters were handy with a cane. But at least he had also had friends and been able to go home for the holidays. 

They made their way through dust and drifts of forgotten items, one left shoe, a comic, a doll with no hair, a toy bird with a broken beak and year old newspapers fluttering slightly nervously in the air they stirred up in their wake. Harry resisted a superstitious urge to look behind him. The place was ghostly, like all empty schools, ringing silently with the noise of a hundred children. 

The office was still full of cabinets and files. Obviously the evacuation was considered temporary. Samuel went at once for the main desk.

“We need the staff register. Perhaps we can work out who ‘A’ is. It would need to be someone who worked here when Gareth was resident.”

Harry nodded and began to search.

Old bills, grocery orders, records of children deposited, apprenticed, invoices from doctors called for whooping cough, scarlet fever, measles. Accounts books going back to 1875 with crabbed writing which Harry couldn’t make out. Paper, paper, paper.

Sighing wearily he pushed aside a pile and picked something up and froze.

Gareth Sanders, D.O.B 10th May 1926- CONFIDENTIAL

“Samuel. I’ve found his file.”

Samuel, who had been a whirlwind of grumpy activity until then, went still. Then he stalked over to Harry and took the folder. They both stared at it for a moment as though it was something ticking on a bomb site. Samuel opened it and started reading. 

After awhile he began to read aloud, robotically. “Mother, Lucy Telford, aged 19. Father Robert Telford, aged 21. Child born in correctional institution in Lambeth where mother was resident for unnatural practices leading to pregnancy. Incest. Child removed from mother at birth. Examining doctor declared child physically normal. Magistrate ordered that child be renamed and placed in state care. Magistrate also placed a seal on the records and determined that the child is not to be told of his origin. All state officials are requested to honour this order for the sake of the child.”

Harry wished that the request had been honoured. If it had Gareth’s life would have been easier.

“There’s a note pencilled in the margin,” Samuel said, voice hard as nails. “August 1930, Mother Lucy Telford, now calling herself Hannah Cooper, came to us and demanded to see the child. Accusations were made that we had ‘stolen’ him. It was explained that she had forfeited all legal right to the infant due to the infamous manner of his conception. Ms Telford became hysterical and had to be removed from the premises. She has since written to the child on multiple occasions and the letters have been destroyed on advice of the headmaster. The letters stopped in 1934 when Ms Telford died of influenza in Islington Workhouse.”

Samuel folded the file and stuffed it into his pocket, hands shaking.

“You’re going to show that to Gareth,” Harry said.

“Yes. He ought to know his real name at least and that she cared.” Samuel turned away and began to search again. Harry swallowed the lump in his throat and joined him.

Just as he was starting to think that he would have to suggest leaving so that he wouldn’t be late for duty, Samuel stood up stiffly from his place at a low shelf and said, “This is it. Staff register 1920-present. We’ll take it with us. We need to get you to work.”

Outside it was dark and people were hurrying home. No one liked being out and about at night these days. 

It was a relief to be out of the orphanage and they pushed the windows down again to let in the fresh air (as fresh as London air ever was). Samuel drove too fast but Harry wasn’t about to complain. He understood Samuel’s anger. Gareth had suffered unnecessarily because of the actions of others. The injustice of it made Harry queasy and he could only imagine how it was making Samuel feel.

Harry wondered if Samuel even knew that he was acting as a father to the boy.

He suspected however that even the suggestion that Samuel might be harbouring woolly, paternal, emotions towards Gareth would leave Harry vulnerable to thrown cutlery. 

Harry was pulled from his thoughts by a rattling noise. 

“Fuck,” Samuel breathed, as the car rolled to a stop by a bakers. “Petrol.”

“Ah,” Harry observed. “Yes, it’s always nice to have that. I take it that we...er...don’t?”

Samuel shook his head. “I wasn’t planning a jaunt across London as well as the trip to Devon. We’ve run out.”

Harry got out of the car and looked around. No garage in sight, and besides, as Samuel soon informed him, they had no stamps anyway. 

“We’ll walk then,” Harry announced. “It’s only a mile or two to the underground from here, I think.”

“Right. I’ll send someone for the car tomorrow.” Samuel locked the doors and glared in a random manner at some passing children, “Presuming the locals haven’t made off with it by then, of course.”

It turned out that they were further from the underground than Harry had thought so they were still out in the open, and nowhere near a shelter, one hour later when the air raid siren began. As always the sound send a thrill of horror right up Harry’s spine. 

Samuel sighed, “Bugger.” 

They broke into a run but the siren seemed to chase them and they couldn’t find anywhere to take shelter. They were in the dark in empty streets and Harry could already hear the engine sounds of bombers above them. He had had nightmares like this, about being caught outside nowhere near safety. His heart was in his throat. 

Samuel ground to a halt abruptly and then dragged Harry down an alleyway and threw him against a wall. They clung together, panting, as the whine they had been dreading indicated that a bomb had been dropped and there was now nothing to be done but wait to see if it hit them or not. Harry stared into Samuel’s eyes, just visible in the light of the anti-aircraft beams shining above them, and Samuel laughed wildly and kissed him.

Harry kissed him back as the whine got louder, fully aware that this could be the last kiss, the last anything, his last breath on earth.

And two streets away the bomb hit, close enough to shower them with dust and nearly throw them from their feet.

Harry dug his fingers into Samuel’s hair and kissed harder.

There was another whine and Harry could barely hear himself think over the bombers, the sirens, the sound of bricks crashing onto pavement and the thudding of his own heartbeat. Over the sound of the world falling down about their ears.

There was another explosion, nearer this time, the wall he was up against trembled, their ears rung. 

Samuel laughed again and bit Harry’s neck.

And stood back, turned his face to the sky, flung his arms wide and yelled, “Do your worst, you bastards! You don’t scare us! We’re British!”

“You’re insane!” Harry shouted, laughing too now, as another explosion sent shockwaves rippling up the street. “You’re out of your mind!”

“All the best chaps are!” Samuel yelled, over the sound of yet another whine.

Harry pulled him back and kissed him again.

While the bombs fell.


	9. Chapter 9

Harry coughed painfully and tried to rub the smoke out of his eye but it only watered more. 

It had been a terrible night. After he had arrived, just in time, for duty there had been a second, longer raid and the fires burnt almost beyond their capacity to put them out. They were still desperately working as dawn broke, hours after the last bomb had fallen, their eyes stinging, their clothes smoking, shaking with tiredness and fear. Harry had forgotten everything but this. The past, the future, Karen, Samuel...nothing was real but the war. The war had taken everything that mattered.

He sat on some rubble, head in hands, running over and over the events of the night.

The woman whose nightgown had melted to her body and was screaming as they put her in the ambulance.

The wall which had seemed to collapse in slow motion, crushing young Thompson’s lower body. Thompson was only nineteen and had joined the fire service a month ago. 

Now he was dead.

Harry had lent him a book on Tuesday.

But now he was dead.

Harry couldn’t see anything in their future but fire and death.

A hand came down gently on his shoulder. “Harry?”

Harry looked up and found Joseph there, with a bleak smile and tired eyes. “It’s morning,” Joseph told him. “We can go home. Come on.”

For a moment Harry couldn’t stand. It seemed impossible. It seemed more than a soul could be expected to endure, night after night. But then he thought of Samuel, for the first time in hours, thought of how many times he had got into a plane knowing that the odds were against his survival, that in fact each time he did it the odds lengthened. 

You did what you had to do.

Harry stood up.

 

Samuel had said nothing about it but Harry wasn’t surprised when he turned up at the lodging house the next afternoon. Joseph who was in the hallway on the telephone to one of his many girlfriends, rose an eyebrow at the sight of Samuel but said nothing. Harry blushed as he took him upstairs to his room. Joseph must realise that Samuel and Harry were off to have sex (hopefully).

He briefly wondered what the landlady would say if she knew that there was a queer living in her house. 

Fortunately Samuel was in uniform and so when they bumped into the landlady outside Harry’s room she was so busy admiring him and making sure that he didn’t want a cup of tea that there seemed no room in her mind for suspicions.

It wasn’t until Harry had Samuel safely in his room and the door shut that it hit him.

Samuel was in uniform.

“Why are you... I thought you had another week’s leave?” Harry blurted as Samuel sat down on the rickety bed and looked around with mild horror at the run down state of the place.

Samuel met his eye and shrugged. “They said I have to go back tonight. They can’t have anyone on leave now. Not after the last few days.”

Sickness rose up in Harry’s gut. The RAF had ordered Samuel back because there weren’t enough pilots. 

There weren’t enough pilots because the pilots kept getting killed. 

“So, you’re going back to the base tonight,” Harry said, flatly, repressing the surge of panic, of fear which was howling through him. In only a few hours Samuel would be flying again. An RAF officer had the lowest life expectancy of any enlisted man, everyone knew that. Samuel had already defied the odds by surviving the summer.

“Yes,” Samuel leaned back on the bed and looked up at the water stain on the ceiling from the winter before last. “At six o clock. Do you know this place smells of mould?”

Harry couldn’t help himself. He sank onto the bed, pulled Samuel against him and buried his face in Samuel’s neck, saying nothing. He held on like a vice, as though he could keep Samuel here forever if he just held on tight enough. Keep him safe.

“Stop that,” Samuel snapped suddenly.

Ashamed, Harry drew back. Samuel was glaring at him. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t you do that, don’t you dare!” Samuel hissed, sitting up and reaching for a cigarette. “Don’t you look at me like I’m already dead. It’s bad enough that I...that we...Gareth’s friend was shot down last night. He pitched into the Thames and drowned. All morning I had to watch Gareth not crying. I wish he had cried. Somehow the not crying was worse. But at least wait until I’m dead before you start grieving for me.”

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Harry blurted wretchedly. How stupid he had been! Of course flyers, men like Samuel, must hate the way everyone treated them like saints in waiting. Always the assumption that they would be dead sooner or later. 

“I’ve seen it before, that look you had on your face,” Samuel said bitterly, inhaling his cigarette. “When the wives and girlfriends say goodbye to a flyer at the base. When their leave is up. Like he’s a walking corpse. He’s still alive and well but the woman is already crying. It pisses me off.”

Harry nodded, mutely. 

Neither of them spoke for awhile. Harry was painfully aware of the clock ticking. 

Six o clock.

Five hours.

“You can’t come to the base,” Samuel said, abruptly. “It would look too strange. So today will be the last time for awhile.”

Harry looked up, horrified. Should he take what Samuel said at face value or was this Samuel ending it? Had it been a leave romance?

“Stop panicking,” Samuel gave him a wry smile and ran his hand through Harry’s hair, “You look like a man thinking he’ll never get fucked again.”

Harry surprised himself by laughing. 

Samuel’s smile broadened. “I promise that whenever I get permission to leave base for a few hours I will come and find you and fuck you until you can’t walk. Deal?”

Harry nodded and kissed Samuel hungrily, sank back on the bed with Samuel’s hands on him, reaching between his legs to rub, pulling Harry’s shirt off impatiently, touching and stroking and possessing. Harry submitted to it gladly, without hesitation, lost in the feel and smell and beauty of Samuel. Lost in hunger.

And fear.

This time he had to be quiet. The lodging house walls were thin, the landlady was home as were several of the other residents. So when Samuel pushed forcefully into him Harry bit into his own hand to keep from making any noise. It was torture, staying silent, when overwhelmed by sensation, by the hard flesh inside him, by the pleasure of Samuel’s hand. They quickly worked out that the bed didn’t creak if Harry lay on his side, and Samuel curled up behind him, hips moving and left arm draped over Harry’s hip so that he could stroke. Harry could feel Samuel’s whole body, spooned against his back, could feel every inch of his dick as Samuel slowly had him. It was agonising and wonderful.

And it could be the last time.

Samuel was whispering hotly in his ear, telling him that he was hot, tight. Telling him to let go, to lose control. It wasn’t until Samuel said that that Harry even knew that he had been resisting his climax, as though by so doing he could prevent it being over and keep them both here like this forever. 

Samuel wasn’t having that though.

He began to thrust harder and faster, to stroke more firmly.

Harry whimpered into his fist and shuddered his pleasure into Samuel’s hand. He shook with it, knocked sideways by it. Acting on instinct he took Samuel’s hand after, as Samuel’s gasps indicated his own ending, and licked his spend from Samuel’s fingers. Samuel caught his breath and then filled Harry’s body with one long groan.

Afterwards Harry turned over in the bed and they just lay there for some time, Samuel’s long legs tangled with his, occasionally kissing but mostly just looking at each other. Memorising.

The clock continued to tick.

Eventually Samuel sighed and stretched. “I gave Gareth his file, you know.”

“What was his response?” Harry asked. He couldn’t help running a hand gently down Samuel’s naked body, stroking his nipples, his hips. Samuel didn’t stop him.

“I don’t know. He didn’t say anything. It must be a sod to find out that your mother did love you but she’s dead anyway.”

“Hmmm...” Harry tried not to think about Gareth’s parents. It hurt. Whenever he thought of Gareth’s mother his mind showed him Karen. And whenever he thought of Gareth’s father, his mind showed him his own face.

“Have you told him about the blackmail?” Harry asked.

“Yes, I had no choice. Whoever is blackmailing us has been watching us. They followed us to Devon. They might still be watching us. He had to know for his own safety. If they’re capable of blackmail then they might be capable of other things. Gareth did not...react positively to the news.”

“I should think not.”

“He says he’ll beat them up.”

“I don’t doubt it. He would do anything for you. I saw that the first night we met. What about the orphanage staff book? Have you found anyone who could be ‘A’?”

“There are dozens of people who worked at the orphanage when Gareth was there. It could be any of them. ‘A’ is probably a code anyway. I was going to pay a visit to each of them but now my leave is up I don’t have time.”

“I’ll do it,” Harry said, at once. “Give me the list and I’ll find the blackmailer.”

Samuel raised an eyebrow but the smile which spread across his face was sincere. “You’re very confident. Alright,” he leaned towards his trousers on the back of the chair and took a folded piece of paper out of his pocket. “Here are the names and their addresses. Of course some of the older staff members might have moved or died since then so you’ll have to track them down.”

Harry took the piece of paper. “Right.”

“If you can’t find the blackmailer and...persuade...him to stop, then I suppose I’ll just have to pay him.” Samuel lay back and reached up to tug Harry’s hair. 

Harry bent down and kissed him. Deeply. He ran his hands downwards during the kiss and noticed that Samuel was hardening again. His heart leapt. Maybe they could...He looked at the clock. 

There was still time, still time, he told himself.

He began to stroke Samuel, gently. Samuel caught his eye, smirking. “Somehow I don’t think you want to talk about Gareth or blackmailers or anything much right now.” 

Harry felt abashed but didn’t stop touching. Samuel was fully hard now and thrusting into his hand. Harry’s heart was pounding. He wanted to touch Samuel everywhere. To have all of him. He slid his fingers down and let one slip gently against Samuel’s hole.

Samuel froze.

Harry snatched his hand back. “I...do you not like that? Sorry.”

Samuel swallowed visibly and then, to Harry’s shock and dismay, he abruptly stood up, wrenching himself out of Harry’s arms. 

“Please, don’t!” Harry exclaimed, kneeling up and grabbing Samuel’s arm. “It was only a touch.”

Samuel just stood with his back to Harry for a long moment. Harry could have sworn that Samuel was shaking. 

“Forgive me,” Harry begged, “Come back to bed, Sam.”

Samuel turned around. Harry started at the look on Samuel’s face. It wasn’t anger but fear and it was the first time Harry had seen it. “What’s wrong?” He asked, “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Samuel hesitated and then with a weary sigh he sat back down on the bed. There was a long silence before he said, “At school, round about the fifth form, were you good looking?”

Harry smiled faintly. “I had pimples and greasy hair. No, I wasn’t good looking.”

“Well,” Samuel glanced at him, “I was.”

Harry started to understand.

“At least that’s what the boys in the sixth form thought.”

“Oh, Samuel. I’m so sorry. Did they...?” Harry remembered his own boarding school. Many of the boys had fallen foul of an older pupil in that way. It happened at every boarding school, but the thought of it happening to Samuel made Harry see fire.

“They tried,” Samuel said. “They did not succeed. But I would rather you don’t touch me like that. I spent most of my school life protecting my arse from a buggering. It’s a difficult habit to break. It might seem like hypocrisy on my part, considering what I do to you, and it is, but you seem to like it on the bottom and I like it on the top so why mess around with a winning formula?” Samuel's tone was slightly defensive and impatient, clearly he didn't want to talk about this.

“I don’t care,” Harry told him, earnestly, lying back and spreading his legs, pulling Samuel down on top of him, “I consider that I have the better part of the arrangement.”

“Is that so?” Samuel enquired, kissing him. “Shall we test that theory?”

“Yes,” Harry whispered, looking up into Samuel’s eyes, knowing that after admitting something like that it would do Samuel good to lose himself in fucking again, it would make him forget the past. Harry knew a lot about needing to forget the past. “Fuck me.”

 

“I’m glad they didn’t succeed in buggering you,” Harry said, later. He knew he shouldn’t raise the subject again but he wanted Samuel to know. “Because if anyone had hurt you I would have had to find him and kill him.”

Samuel chuckled, still lost in the haze of climax, only half listening.

‘He thinks I’m joking.’ Harry thought

I’m not joking.


	10. Chapter 10

Samuel was gone.

Gone down the stairs, through the front door, out into the street, each step a progression which couldn’t be fought or changed or objected to. Harry had to pretend to be resigned. Samuel showed no sign of concern, there was even a whiff of relief to be back on duty, to be on his way back to the sky.

“At least I will be doing something, rather than sitting in a shelter all night,” he had remarked laconically as they were dressing.

Harry had wanted to ask, ‘What’s it like? Flying? What’s it like when they are shooting at you?’

But he didn’t.

He only took Samuel aside before they left Harry’s bedroom and kissed him, slow and gentle. Harry wanted to kiss him in a way that was nothing to do with sex. He wanted Samuel to understand that his feelings weren’t rooted in that.

He wanted lots of things.

And now Samuel was gone. Harry sat in his room again, having seen Samuel off with all the signs of cheerful camaraderie, with a smile on his face which hurt in its dishonesty. The bedclothes were rumpled and the room smelt of sex. Harry himself probably smelt of sex. He inhaled, eyes closed, fighting for emotional control. This had been one of the things he had been afraid of when he first met Samuel (and was that truly only nine days ago?), this battle to restrain his feelings. 

It felt as though the years after Karen had been an empty space, calm and dead but now everything was blood thumping and terror and love.

“Harry?” 

Joseph’s voice. Harry tried to answer but there was a lump in his throat. He just kept seeing burning planes.

“Harry, open the door.”

Harry hesitated. If he didn’t talk to Joseph about it then maybe it wasn’t real. Maybe it wasn’t possible that he would never see Samuel again.

“Harry,” Joseph’s voice held a hint of warning, “If you don’t let me in I’ll go down to the kitchen and take all them neat labels you did off the cupboards. You’ll never find the bicarbonate of soda ever again.”

Harry winced. 

When Joseph came in Harry sat back down on the bed (trying not to think about the obvious evidence of sex in the room) and chewed anxiously at a nail. Joseph knelt down between his knees and smiled at him.

“How are you doing, old thing?” He asked, kindly. “So, his leave is up, eh?”

Harry nodded. He felt ridiculous. He’d only known Samuel for a week. He had no right to be reacting in this way. Not compared to the wives and mothers and daughters whose men had gone. Harry couldn’t be a wife so he had no place in the story. 

“He’ll muddle through,” Joseph told him, patting his knee awkwardly. “While there is a spoon in England they’ll never bring him down.”

Harry snorted, glad for once that he had lost an eye because it meant that he was only half crying.

“And look at it this way,” Joseph grinned, wickedly. “Your arse will thank you for the recovery time.”

“Joseph!” Harry blushed, shocked.

Joseph chortled gleefully. “Speaking of which, I told you it wouldn’t be so peculiar for a man to want me. One of your sort showed me his old chap in the gent’s toilets in Hyde Park yesterday.”

“What did you do?” 

“I said, ‘that’s very nice but what do you expect me to do with it?’” Joseph leaned back on his heels, clearly warming to his story, “And the shameless bugger told me exactly what I could do with it! It was right educational.”

“You didn’t...did you?” Harry wondered, suddenly beset with terrifying mental images.

“Course not. I explained that I wasn’t that sort of man and he ran off.” Joseph chortled again. “He thought I was queer! Me!”

“It was certainly a misjudgement.” Harry agreed. “I hope you were tactful when you refused him.”

“I was. I don’t want to be breaking no hearts. Although I don’t think his heart was the main thing, right then.” Joseph stood up.

“So,” he said, stoically not looking at the bed. “It’s our evening off and it’s my belief that you will want to get rat-arsed.”

“Yes please,” Harry breathed.

 

Four warm beers later and the world was pleasantly swimming. Harry was draped across his bench and feeling calmer. Or, at least, less desperate. 

They had managed a booth and that meant that Harry could hide himself away from other people. Which was what he fancied doing. Only Joseph could be tolerated this evening. More than tolerated. Joseph had this way of making Harry feel safe, even though he wasn’t. Even though none of them were safe.

Joseph came back, only a little unsteadily, with beer number five and plonked himself down next to Harry.

“Cheers,” Harry said.

“Cheers,” Joseph agreed.

They drank for a while. Harry tried not to stare at the woman in widow’s weeds who had just come in for a jug of gin. She waited quietly while the landlord filled it up. The pub was noisy but she seemed to be carrying silence with her. People edged away respectfully. As she turned to leave she caught Harry’s eye. His breath stuck in his throat. He felt oddly guilty. 

“Harry, I want your advice,” Joseph said, breaking into Harry’s thoughts. Harry turned to him, grateful for a distraction.

“Of course.”

Joseph fidgeted and Harry realised that he was embarrassed. He wasn’t sure he had ever seen Joseph embarrassed before. 

“Well, thing is,” Joseph coughed nervously, “I...er...I’ve met this woman. I mean, lady. She’s...well...she’s...” He trailed off.

Harry was blushing in sympathy now. “She’s...important?”

Joseph nodded. “I’ve never, well, I’ve got lots of funny feelings about her. I keep imagining her at home with lots of red headed kids.”

Harry’s mouth dropped open.

“What?”

“Yeah, I know. It’s me, right? But she’s just...I think I’m buggered, Harry,” Joseph said, mournfully.

“Well, I’m the expert there,” Harry replied, without thinking.

Joseph gaped at him for a moment and then they both started giggling like school boys. 

Eventually Harry went for beer six.

“So, what’s the problem?” He asked, later. “Aside from your new found, and frankly disturbing, interest in monogamy and fatherhood.”

Joseph gave him a ‘what could be worse than that’ look and then sighed. “She’s posh, Harry. Really posh. She went to schools where they played hockey and chaps like me cleaned the toilets.”

“Oh, Joseph...”

“She likes me well enough, I reckon. But...it can’t last, can it? A girl like that and me? I’m her bit of wartime rough.”

“You don’t know that,” Harry told him. “Have you asked her?”

Joseph lit a cigarette, glumly. The smell made Harry think of bed and skin and Samuel.

“I’m not like you, Harry. I can’t talk to people serious like. I make jokes out of everything. Besides, I’ve got my pride. It’s the girl what’s supposed to worry about the future.”

Harry sighed, “How do you know that she isn’t worrying about it? For all you know she’s thinking exactly the same thing. Does she know your reputation with women?”

Joseph looked uncomfortable. “Probably. She’s friends with another girl that I...er...you know.”

Harry had always suspected that Joseph’s superlative romantic success would come back to bite him sooner or later. “Then you’ll have to make the first move to show her that you’re serious about her.”

“But how can I be serious about her!” Joseph objected, miserably. “I mean, being friends with you has made me speak posher but it’s rubbish really. I’m still me. Son of a miner, left school with no exams. I’m not even set up for a trade. I’m...beneath a woman like that. Even if she did want me, her family would never let her marry a...” Joseph trailed off. “And there’s something else. Something I never told you.”

Harry was aching for his friend. “What’s that?”

Joseph coughed again and stubbed out his cigarette, not meeting Harry’s gaze. “You know I said my dad fought in the last war?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t say which side he fought on. It wasn’t German lads he had nightmares about shooting. It was English lads. I lied to you. I’ve been lying to you since the day we met. I lie to everyone.”

“Oh...oh. You’re...he was...” Harry’s voice dropped. He knew now what a dangerous conversation they were having.

“I grew up mostly in Yorkshire. My mother was English and she moved us here in 1920 after the war. Changed our name. Changed everything. But Dad was German. So I’m German. That’s why I can’t join up. That’s why they’ll only let me be a fireman. And since we’re telling secrets that’s not all either.” Joseph finally made eye-contact, breathing rapidly. 

Harry had reached out, instinctively, under the table and was holding Joseph’s hand tightly, where no one could see. 

He was starting to understand why he and Joseph had been drawn together back at the hospital. Perhaps they had sensed each other’s difference. Their isolation. Their secrets.

“This other thing...some people would say it’s worse than being German.” Joseph emptied his beer. “But ever since Devon, when you told me everything, I’ve been terrible ashamed of myself for lying to you. You’re my friend and I want you to know everything. And I need your help. You’re so good with words. You’re educated. I need you to help me tell her.”

“Alright,” Harry squeezed Joseph’s hand. 

“I need to know how to tell a nice English girl that I’m half German and,” Joseph swallowed, “That I’m a Jew.”


	11. Chapter 11

Harry’s smile was so broad that he felt as though it came from his feet. It was such an honour to be taken into Joseph’s confidence. To be trusted like this. He tightened his hold on Joseph’s hand. Joseph, who had been staring at his pint, glanced at him, nervously.

“You don’t mind or nothing, do you?” Joseph asked, slurring his words enough to make Harry wonder if Joseph would ever have been able to tell him sober. “My mum always said to keep our mouths shut about it. When I was a kid she said if my friends found out they wouldn’t want to play with me no more.”

Harry saw a worried child from long ago flash into Joseph’s eyes for a moment, but then he was gone. 

“I hope that she was wrong. I hope that the other children wouldn’t have reacted like that.” Harry said, quietly. “I can only speak for myself, if I had known you then. I think I would have been intrigued and impressed. I would have thought you were special.”

“Really?” Joseph started to smile a little, started to relax.

“Yes,” Harry thought back to himself as a boy. Thought of the books he read and the dreams he had and how tedious everything in the real world had seemed in comparison. If someone like Joseph had exploded into his life, with his kindness, his energy, his exotic blood, his loyalty... Harry would have thought him like a hero from one of his books. But now, as an adult, Harry knew that there was more to Joseph than that. Something simpler. 

“You...” Harry blushed, “You are a truly good man.”

Joseph reddened and his mouth opened but Harry barrelled on, embarrassed but determined to speak the truth. Especially as he suspected that Joseph had never heard it before.

“I was very, very lucky to meet you. You saved me. You accepted everything, including my secrecy and then you accepted the truth when I finally told it. You see people, only people, and not types. You are kind and brave and not limited by the life you’ve led. You’re honest.”

“How can you say that?” Joseph mumbled, apparently unable to let that one slide, face flaming at all the praise. “I’ve been lying to you for years.”

“You are wise to keep it secret until you’re sure of the person,” Harry dropped his voice, “It is not safe to be German in England now, not even half German. I don’t like to think what could happen to you if it was widely known, particularly since the bombings started. I’m surprised you’ve managed to avoid the internment camps.”

Joseph smiled. “Well, I may be German but I’ve got the luck of the Irish! They thought about packing me off to the enemy aliens camp but I reckon the interviewing lady fancied me, and then there was my English birth certificate 'coz I was born when mum was visiting her parents in Wales, and me volunteering for the fire service. I still have to sign in once a month so they know where I am.” Joseph took a draft of his beer. Cleared his throat. “And, the other thing? The Jewish thing? What do you reckon about lyin’ about that?”

Harry hesitated. He wondered if Joseph was asking for absolution for denying himself or to be told that he wasn’t a coward for doing so. “May I be frank?”

Joseph nodded, looking worried.

“You could certainly argue that it is only sensible to conceal being a Jew because people could attack you for it. There will always be someone who will hate and fear what is different and there are so few Jews in England. But, are you sure...are you sure that it wasn’t more that your step-mother raising you to hide it made you ashamed of it and that’s why you don’t tell people?”

Joseph didn’t speak for a moment. “That’s not it. I’m not ashamed of being German or Jewish or working class. I’m proud of all three, as it happens, even if I have to lie about the first one to keep people from kicking my head in. It’s...me that I’m ashamed of. She said...she said I didn’t deserve to be Jewish. She said I disgraced our people because I’m so stupid and worthless and,”

Joseph trailed off. Harry held onto his hand even tighter. Rage was suddenly coursing through him. 

“She was a heartless, stupid, bitch and you should ignore everything she ever said to you and wherever she is I hope she’s dead,” Harry spat, self control broken by anger and alcohol and having wanted to say this ever since he first learnt the story behind Joseph’s scars. Joseph was staring at him in shock. ‘Yes,’ Harry thought, ‘you’ve never seen this before.’

‘This is me.’

‘Part of me, anyway. The part that comes out when someone hurts someone I love. The part that burns down villages.’

But then the haze cleared and he realised exactly what he had said and that, despite everything, she was still Joseph’s mother. 

“Joseph,” he was distraught, “I’m sorry, I,”

“No,” Joseph said, sharply. “That’s enough.” He disentangled his hand firmly, got up, and walked out of the pub. 

Harry watched him go, sick with horror. 

 

Two hours later he was stone cold sober and sitting on his bed, head whirling miserably about the events of the day.

Samuel was gone. He was back on the base. He might be flying right now. He might be dead.

And Joseph had opened his heart to him and Harry had monumentally ballsed it up. He couldn’t help comparing how he had dealt with it to how Joseph had dealt with Harry’s own secrets. Joseph had been calm and open and hadn’t judged him, even though Harry’s secrets, unlike Joseph’s, were dark ones, shameful ones. Harry on the other hand, on being told Joseph’s history, had managed to end up profoundly insulting Joseph’s step-mother, the only mother figure he had.

Which was terrible and wrong.

Even if she did deserve it.

Harry groaned and buried his face in the pillow.

Then there was a knock at the door. His heart jumped with hope. “Yes?”

The door opened and Joseph came in, without a word, sat on the bed and lit a cigarette. His expression was grim.

“Here’s how I see it,” he said. “My step-mum couldn’t love me. When she married my dad I was a baby and she promised to raise me like her own but she hated me because I looked like my real mum so much. She couldn't admit that, especially to my dad, so she started looking for better reasons why she couldn’t love me. And, you’re right. Most of the things she said about me weren’t true. She made me ashamed of things I ought to be proud of. My brother used to say so, even then. He had his own trouble with her. I told you in Devon what they did together. She was a bad woman, a bad mother, and my brother and me both deserved better. But,” Joseph looked Harry right in the eye, “You don’t get to say that.”

Harry nodded, “Of course, of course. You’re absolutely right. It wasn’t my place.”

Joseph nodded. “Alright then. We’ll say no more about it. Just put your clever brain and all them pretty words you know into thinking how I can tell Isobel that a half German, red-headed Jew with a thirty a day smoking habit and no money, would quite fancy marrying her. I think I ought to break it to her gentle like.”

Harry smiled, “She’ll be lucky to have you.”

“Humph,” Joseph retorted, sceptically. “Now...don’t get all queer excited but I’m going to share with you tonight.”

Harry managed nothing more than a, “Eh?” 

Joseph flicked ash onto Harry’s clean floor. “I know how you think, Harry. You’ll worry that I secretly hate you now. You’ll worry all night and all of tomorrow and then forever and ever after that. All over a little difference in opinion after a mite too much beer. So I’m staying here tonight to show there’s no bad feeling between us. We’ve done it before when your nightmares was bad.”

Harry was so moved that he couldn’t speak.

“Also,” Joseph added, “I saw a cockroach in my bed.”

Harry blinked and then burst out laughing. 

 

Soon after that they went to bed. Joseph curled up behind him. It felt nice to have him there, friendly. Comforting. It distracted Harry a little from thinking of the empty space where Samuel ought to be. Harry wondered how much this sleeping arrangement was actually about Joseph feeling lonely and vulnerable tonight. He wondered if Joseph even knew himself, what his real reason was for sharing a bed with his friend. Harry also couldn’t help wondering how much physical danger Joseph would be in if Samuel knew about this occasional habit of theirs and misunderstood. 

“Just no funny business, alright?” Joseph grumbled sleepily. “I know I’m irresistible but, yuck.”

Harry smiled at the ceiling. 

And slept.

 

Alcoholic insomnia dictated that they woke early and after an hour or so of groaning and wishing for a bomb to fall upon them right now please Harry decided that the only thing to do was get some fresh air.

Unfortunately they lived in London so no fresh air was to be had. Dirty air would have to do.

Harry got dressed and went for the piece of paper with the orphanage staff listed. He hoped Samuel would forgive him for what he was about to do. After all, Samuel hadn’t given Harry permission to tell Joseph anything about the blackmail.

“Okdoky,” Joseph nodded, when Harry had explained (leaving out the details of Gareth’s parentage, that secret not being Harry’s to tell) “You shouldn’t go on your tod anyway. If you do find the blackmailing bastard, he’ll probably be a nasty sort and two are better than one at times like that.”

“Are you sure? We’re on duty tonight. I don’t want you to be exhausted.”

Joseph shrugged. 

They were always exhausted anyway.

For the next eight hours they went all across London, on buses, on trains, on foot. They knocked on doors, consulted locals, tracked down former landladies and landlords, lied a great deal, drank endless cups of tea in dingy front parlours and by early evening they had managed to cross all of the names off Samuel’s list. Some were dead, one had emigrated to Australia years before, one was in prison, and of the others one was a lovely little old lady with a lot of cats who probably didn’t even know what a queer was and kept force-feeding them cake, and all the others failed the test. 

It was a simple test. Whoever was blackmailing them had followed them to Devon and so had seen them before. Although the blackmailer’s attention would have been primarily on Samuel and Gareth, he or she would certainly recognise Harry and Joseph. The blackmailer would know at once why they were there. So all Harry had to do was look for the flicker of recognition or panic. To this end having Joseph, in all his red headed glory, tall and powerful looking, helped enormously. 

But all day no one had looked anything but faintly bemused to see them. Or, in the case of the old lady, delighted to have someone to eat cake and be sat on by tabbies.

Harry sighed and carefully put away the piece of paper. It was useless now but he liked looking at Samuel’s impatient handwriting, skittering across the page like an angry spider in search of a spoon.

They had stopped back at the lodging house for half an hour’s rest before duty. Harry felt bleak. He was almost certain that the blackmailer wasn’t one of the orphanage’s staff. Which meant that it could be anyone. Samuel was going to have to pay up. 

“I suppose,” Joseph ruminated while peering under his bed for the cockroach, brandishing a rolled up newspaper, “that he could hang about the gent’s toilets at King’s Cross until the bugger came for the money and nab him then.”

“The blackmailer is bound to have thought of that,” Harry said, secretly thinking that it was Joseph’s own fault that he had cockroaches, considering the state of his room. “He’ll probably come with some big friends to collect the money.”

“Alright then, how about you hide somewhere and wait and at least get a butchers at him? You might not be able to stop him taking the money but you’ll know what he looks like. Might help later.” Joseph pulled a lady’s brassier out from under his bed and frowned. “How did that get there?”

Harry blushed. “Can’t you imagine?”

Joseph smirked, “Well, yeah. But they generally put them back on again afterwards.”

“Oh good grief...”

Joseph had a point though. At the moment all the power was on the side of the blackmailer. They could at least try to see his face. 

“When’s the money due?” Joseph asked, from under the bed. 

“The first of September. Samuel will have to get leave for it somehow.”

A chuckle emerged from beneath the mattress, “So you’ll get to see him. That’s a golden lining.”

Harry had to admit that he had already thought of that. Several times. 

Joseph yelled, “There you are you ‘orrible little thing! Harry, the newspaper, if you please...”

In the end it was an epic battle which would have done the Pathe News Reel proud. The cockroach (and three friends) put up a valiant resistance but eventually had to concede defeat when chased by not only Harry and Joseph, but the landlady and half the residents. No one wanted cockroaches threatening the house. Bombs were bad enough. 

On the field of victory Harry had to take responsibility for cleaning Joseph’s room to prevent a recurrence because, as the landlady pointed out, ‘you’re so much better at this sort of thing.’ Joseph had grinned with unrepentant glee seeing that he had got out of housework. Again. Harry was just glad to see by Joseph’s relaxed behaviour that Joseph really didn’t harbour any hard feelings over the night before. That was one of the things Harry liked best about Joseph. When he said he was going to do something, he did it. Including forgiving people.

Still, Harry thought, as they went to their fire station, it was very worrying that he had lost control like that. He hadn’t had a burst of rage that unprovoked, that abrupt, that uncontrolled since Spain. 

It was Samuel.

Samuel had brought him back to life.

And that was not an entirely good thing.


	12. Chapter 12

Harry was irritated. Really quite seriously irritated, thank you so very much. If the woman ahead of him at the butchers didn’t stop complaining in about two minutes he was going to take determined action with the assistance of a newspaper, a large ham and the people in the rest of the queue, all of whom looked equally irritated.

“Look here, my dear fellow,” the woman was saying, in a nasal voice which carried right out into the street, “I simply don’t see why you cannot accommodate so simple a request.”

“Because,” the butcher said, for the fifth time, through gritted teeth, “You don’t have the stamps for that much bacon. I can’t change the rules for them as has a bit of money. It’s the ration.”

“I think it’s disgraceful! I am Lady Sibyl MacKingtosh-Smythe and I’ve been patronising this establishment for twenty years and you ought to prioritise my order!”

The butcher looked ready to bang his head on his own counter. “It’s not up to me. It’s. The. Ration.”

“Before the war no one dared to speak to me in this manner!”

“No, but I bet they was thinking it,” someone in the queue muttered.

A ripple of laughter went round the shop. Lady Sibyl turned around with narrowed eyes and glared. She then opened her mouth and Harry could take no more since what was about to be said would surely be sneering and unpleasant and she was making him heartily ashamed of his class. 

“Please leave at once,” he said, treating her to the smile which Joseph said ought to be packaged and dropped on Hitler. “You are holding up the queue and a lot of us have jobs to get to later.”

“Hear hear!” someone called and a murmur of resentment began to grow up around Lady Sibyl. Harry’s remark had apparently broken the normal reluctance to openly gainsay a woman like her and now people were jostling her and grumbling insults. Stunned surprise swept the glare from her face and she deflated a little. A weary looking housewife shouldered her way past her and said, “A pound of sausages, Phil.” The butcher nodded and took her ration book.

Harry stood to one side as Lady Sibyl left. She caught his eye, her face red with mortification, but she found enough spirit to hiss,

“This country is going to the dogs! You mark my words!”

Harry shrugged and wondered if the postman had come.

 

He was always thinking about the postman. Was it too early to expect him? Too late? Maybe there had been a letter but the sorting office had been bombed and it was now lost. Harry imagined Samuel’s words in a million pieces, blowing about the sky. Maybe Samuel had been too busy to write or couldn’t get to a post office. Maybe he wasn’t going to write at all, in case the Air Force read his letter and wondered why he was writing to a man. Maybe Samuel had forgotten Harry entirely and wasn’t going to write at all.

And maybe Samuel was dead.

Or burnt.

Or in pieces in a POW camp in Europe somewhere.

Or hiding in a farmhouse in Boulogne, after being shot down, sheltered by Resistance workers, awaiting the tramp of jackboots. The knock at the door.

Joseph shook his head and wolfed another piece of bacon. The kitchen was empty. Since they had been on nights they had often found that they had the house to themselves in the mornings. They would get back from duty, wash the smoke away in the old bathroom where you occasionally had to hit the plumbing with a spanner, and then Harry would make breakfast. Sometimes he would have to go to the butchers or the grocers to buy the food first, as this morning, and when he did Joseph always made it up to him by going through the paper casualty lists looking for Samuel’s name so that Harry didn’t have to. 

When he got back Harry always looked Joseph right in the eye, dreading a look of pity, dreading that Joseph might have seen Samuel’s name.

But this morning, as for the previous two weeks, Joseph just grinned tiredly and said, “Nope, he’s still alive and well and still in a position to throw spoons at people what don’t deserve it. Now, come on. I’m hungry.”

Although, as they both knew, the absence of Samuel’s name on the casualty lists didn’t mean that he was well. Only that he hadn’t been reported missing or dead to the Ministry of War. Yet. Things were chaotic and always changing and men like Samuel might be on duty for twenty hours, and in their plane ten times in that period. It took awhile for things to be official, especially as, by all accounts, the Air Force liked to give late returners a good chance to come back before declaring them missing. So, for all Harry knew to the contrary, Samuel could be dead right now.

“He’s not dead,” Joseph said, for the thousandth time, “And he’s not writing because he just ain’t the type of chap that writes to his sweetheart.”

Harry sighed and sipped his very, very weak tea. “You can’t possibly know the former, Joseph, and as regards the latter, I don’t think Samuel regards me as his sweetheart in any way, shape or form.”

“You’re joking, right?” Joseph chuckled, finishing his bacon and looking mournful because that would be their last for the week. “By the sound of it that time he’s very sweet on you!”

A blush rose up Harry’s face so fast that he could actually feel its progress. “You...you heard us? When?” 

Joseph swallowed some tea, “When he dropped by to say goodbye. And you were even worse. I thought someone was killing a cat in your room!”

Harry was swamped with horror. He had been so sure that they had been quiet! 

Joseph saw his expression and hastily added, “Don’t go all white like that, no one else heard. I was the only one upstairs and I put my gramophone on to drown you out. Not like I wanted to listen to that, anyway.”

Gramophone? Harry thought back to that last afternoon with Samuel. He couldn’t remember hearing a gramophone.

But he couldn’t remember them making noise either.

It seemed that Samuel had a way of filling Harry’s entire universe to the exclusion of all else.

“Thank you, Joseph,” he managed, in a very small voice.

Joseph nodded and rubbed his eyes, yawning. “Well, I’m off for a kip. See you in the afternoon.”

“Good night,” Harry told him, thinking how strange it was to say that with the sun blazing outside. 

It had been a hot August but it was nearly over. It was now the 30th. In two days the blackmail money came due and Harry still didn’t know whether Samuel was going to pay it or if he would even hear from him again. There had been nothing from Samuel since Harry wrote to the base with a coded admission of failure in finding A. Nothing, no letters, no telephone calls. He wasn’t even certain that Samuel had received his own letter, or understood it. 

He’d had to be circumspect. It wasn’t as though he could write the truth which would have gone something like, ‘Dear Samuel. I miss you. I miss you so much. I get hard thinking about you. When is your next afternoon off? I want to see you. I want to spend all of it in bed. Are you alright? I hear the bombers go over and the RAF and I think, is it you? Are you up there right now? Are you frightened? You wouldn’t tell me if you were, I suppose. You wouldn’t tell you that you were frightened. I failed. I’m sorry, I couldn’t find A. I don’t think it’s a former orphanage worker blackmailing you and Gareth. I’m afraid you’ll have to pay up. I miss you. I miss you. Love Harry.’

The only thing worse than the military reading such a letter would be Samuel reading it. Harry could picture the horrified raised eyebrow.

‘Go to bed,’ he told himself, ‘go to bed and stop thinking about it.’

 

He was dreaming. All around him was an endless searing blue sky. He was in a plane with Samuel, who was in the pilot’s seat, smoking casually, and occasionally machine gunning pigeons which wore jackboots. Harry didn’t think this was strange at all. Nor did it seem strange that Karen was knitting baby booties nearby, smiling approvingly at the way Harry was sliding his arms around Samuel, kissing his neck.

Everything was right and good and beautiful.

Until Samuel turned to kiss him, saw Karen, and horror descended over his face.

“I can explain! Wait!” Harry cried, but it was too late. Samuel knew at once. 

“It’s your fault!” Samuel hissed, blue eyes boring into Harry’s face, “You did it! Didn’t you think about how your perversion would destroy your son?”

Harry started screaming then because Samuel had stood up from his seat and so they were falling out of the sky.

 

“Harry! Wake up!”

Harry gasped into consciousness to find Joseph shaking him violently. His heart was in his throat, his pulse pounding.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, bleary. “Did I oversleep?”

“No, though you were in danger in screaming the ‘ouse down,” Joseph grinned. “I woke you up because you’ve got a visitor. Now go downstairs and meet him. He’s in the parlour. I would have put him in the kitchen to wait but I didn’t want him near no spoons.”

Harry was fully awake and gripping Joseph’s hand in a second, “Really? He’s...he’s here?”

Joseph nodded, smile gleeful. “Yep, large as life and twice as grumpy. I’m off to put my gramophone on.”

 

Harry took a deep breath before opening the parlour door. His hands wanted to shake but he wouldn’t let them. He didn’t want Samuel to think he was weak. 

Samuel turned from the fireplace where he had been smoking and gazing down at the empty grate. Harry shut the door behind him, leaned against it in an attempt to steady himself. 

For a terrible moment neither spoke and it was almost as though they were strangers. 

But then Samuel threw his cigarette into the fireplace and stalked forward and Harry was being kissed, up against the door, hungrily, almost desperately. He dug his hands into Samuel’s hair at once, held him as close to him as possible, fighting back moans and also joyful laughter because Samuel was alive, warm, unwounded, and here, kissing Harry.

Five minutes later with the edge off enough for them to speak, Samuel brushed the hair back from Harry’s forehead and kissed it. 

“I got your letter,” he said, quietly.

Harry gently touched his fingers to the shadows under Samuel’s eyes. Samuel looked tired and painfully young. 

“I’m sorry I failed,” he whispered. His leg was still wrapped around Samuel’s hip. He had no intention of moving it even though this position betrayed his arousal. Samuel was hard too so it didn’t matter.

“I’ve got the afternoon off today and again on the first.” Samuel ran his thumb over Harry’s lower lip. Harry had a sudden flashback to a warm night outside a country house. “If anyone asks you’re a sick aunt.”

Harry smiled. 

They couldn’t stop touching each other. 

Harry’s hands were roaming down Samuel’s sides, over cheap uniform material. He bent his head and inhaled Samuel’s neck. He smelt of cigarettes and oil. “Let’s go to bed and stay there,” Harry suggested.

Samuel sighed, “What a marvellous idea.”

 

This time Harry did notice the music coming from Joseph’s room but once Samuel was undressing him, and pushing him down on the bed, Harry stopped being able to hear anything except Samuel’s voice and his own moans. They barely managed to get enough clothes off before Samuel was pressing into him. Harry growled helplessly into the mattress, thrusting his hips back with shameful eagerness.

Samuel bent over him and kissed the back of Harry’s neck as he opened him up with hard, remorseless, thrusts. Harry gloried in every single sensation, including the initial pain because it made him sure that this was really happening. Samuel was inside him, fucking him, stroking Harry with shaking hands, and making the most beautiful sounds of pleasure and relief. As though he had wanted this as much as Harry had.

Harry wondered if Samuel too had been touching himself at night. This thought overwhelmed Harry almost at once, the image of Samuel touching himself and perhaps thinking of Harry while he did, was too much. Harry cried out into the mattress, felt himself spill helplessly over Samuel’s rough fingers, all but writhing at the feeling of it. Samuel didn’t stop moving, in fact he sped up when Harry lost control and for awhile all Harry was aware of was his orgasm receding and Samuel’s stiff dick sliding in and out, in and out, deep and hot. 

Samuel’s hands, one of them wet with Harry’s spend, were now gripping Harry’s hips.

“Yes...” Harry breathed, hardly knowing what he was saying, “Do it, take all of it.”

Samuel moaned, long and low, and shuddered inside him. Harry lifted his hips to accept everything Samuel had. 

‘Mine,’ Harry thought, as Samuel orgasmed between his thighs, in his belly. 

Samuel pulled out, turned Harry onto his back and before Harry could think, Samuel thrust back into him one last time. Harry groaned right from his core, part pain, part agonising pleasure, all triumph.

He looked up at Samuel. 

“Mine,” he breathed, again.

Samuel stared down at him for a moment, eyes clouded with satiety, face open and unguarded, so that Harry could almost see his thoughts.

And then,

“Alright,” Samuel nodded. 

Harry put his arms around him and held him until they fell asleep.

 

They woke up at three and found two cold cups of tea on a tray outside Harry’s bedroom. Joseph’s work. They drank them in bed, naked, and then laid down again. For a long time they did nothing but kiss.

And then Samuel started talking.

About flying. About the base. About twenty hour duties. About the sky and the bombers and the clouds and how no one ever knew if they would live until the next morning. About Gareth and how he could always magically find biscuits. About how brave the Polish flyers were. About how outnumbered they were. About exhaustion and waiting and pep pills which made you barmy.

About losing fellow flyers.

About planes burning.

About the young Scotch pilot whose face had been ripped off by a propeller shaft after the last raid. He’d survived the raid itself but it had been his fortieth in a week and he had got out of his plane and simply walked towards the turning shaft.

As though he just wanted it all to stop, no matter how.

They had all agreed to lie to the authorities and say that he was injured in the raid. 

“He’s going to go through the rest of his life looking like a monster,” Samuel told him, sucking on his cigarette, “No need for him to add ‘coward’ or 'attempted suicide' to that.”

Harry kissed Samuel’s nipple from his place on his chest. “Do you remember the stories about the last war?” he said. “All those soldiers who shot themselves in the foot rather than stay in the trenches?”

“Poor bastards,” Samuel said, a hand coming down to stroke Harry’s hair. “At least I can do something. I’m not stuck in a hole in France for four years.”

Harry saw his point. Given the choice he too would chose flying into danger several times a day over sitting in the trenches of the Great War. He’d lost two uncles at the Somme and the one who had come back didn’t speak.

There was a long silence.

“It was frightful,” Samuel said, at last. His tone was reluctant as though Harry was forcing him to speak. “He was just eyeballs and nose bone and pulpy flesh, no face at all anymore.”

Samuel was shaking.

Harry sat up, sat in Samuel’s lap and looked into the eyes of a man fighting furiously to hold onto his nerve. Fighting to not break down. Harry loved him, entirely.

“Samuel,” he said, softly, kissing Samuel’s mouth, swallowing rapid, slightly panicked breaths, “My love...”

He couldn’t say, ‘don’t be afraid,’ and he couldn’t say, ‘don’t fall apart,’ because Samuel’s pride was such that he would never admit that either were possible, not until he was a gibbering wreck of battle fatigue in a hospital somewhere. Possibly not even then. 

So Harry just sat there and loved him with all his heart, soothing him with hands and mouth, and meaningless endearments, hoping that it would help.

Eventually Samuel’s breathing slowed and he closed his eyes and seemed to relax. 

Harry laid his head on Samuel’s shoulder and stayed there until Samuel grumbled about being smothered. Harry grinned and climbed off him. 

The afternoon was passing rapidly and neither of them could stop it. 

At five Samuel got dressed. Harry, still naked, lay in bed and watched him put on his uniform, watched the grim determination that he put on with it. Just like the last time Samuel left him. But this time, thank god, Harry knew when he would see him again. Even if it was just to pay a blackmailer.

“Why didn’t you write to me?” Harry asked, as Samuel laced his boots. 

Samuel, who was sitting on the edge of the bed with his back to him, turned a little, glanced at him, “You sound like a girl.”

“I know,” Harry nodded, unrepentant.

Samuel shrugged, turned back to his boots, “What with the censors I can’t say what I want to say. Didn’t seem much point. Besides I’m not like you. Words aren’t my thing.”

Harry thought of the painful hope he had experienced every morning for two weeks and the terrible disappointment when the postman came empty handed, but decided that this sort of thing would just be one of the prices he would have to pay for loving Samuel. He would gladly pay it.

Samuel, dressed now and about to leave, stood up. Harry’s stomach went into coiled knots. It had been so quick. Just a few short hours. 

“I miss you,” Harry said.

Samuel looked down at him, then bent and kissed him, ran a possessive hand right down the line of Harry’s body.

“See you in two days,” he said.

And then he was gone.

Again.


	13. Chapter 13

Harry looked at his watch for the fortieth time. 

Samuel was late.

King’s Cross Station was heaving; people moved through it in various shades of muted colour and uniform serge, like a living creature made of haste. Everyone seemed in a hurry except for the occasional couple obviously about to bid each other goodbye after a period of leave. Harry watched the women in their Sunday best, brave smiles painted on their mouths, as they slowly walked their husband or sweetheart to his platform. The man was always in uniform, Army, RAF, Navy, and he always seemed painfully cheerful, or even oblivious, perhaps eager to join his chums again. Eager for action. The younger men, at least.

Harry thought of how Samuel had walked out of his bedroom at the lodging house.

Twice.

At least he knew he would see him today, however briefly.

But it was going to be very briefly if Samuel didn’t arrive soon. What if the blackmailer had already come for the money? If he didn’t find it then surely Samuel and Gareth would be publicly disgraced. Gareth would be sent to some appalling borstal which no doubt would make the orphanage look like heaven by comparison. Samuel could go to jail. Harry didn’t even want to consider that eventuality. Just the thought of the power held over Samuel by this blackmailer made Harry’s fingers twitch for matches.

“Harry?” 

Harry’s mind snapped out of its violent lust and he felt ashamed that there had been pleasure in imagining what he could do if he got hold of the blackmailer. Samuel was looking at him, quizzically. Then he smiled a very faint smile around his cigarette. Harry smiled back. He wished he could kiss him but they were in public. It hurt that he couldn’t kiss him. 

“I know I’m late. Damn C.O. kept me back to lecture me about too much time off base. He said that my ailing aunt should have more consideration for the war effort and stop mucking about, either die or not. Looks like that excuse has worn out so this will have to be my last jaunt for a few weeks.” Samuel hefted a plain black bag, which Harry supposed to contain the money, and they both began to walk towards the toilets.

Harry’s heart sank. So he wouldn’t be seeing Samuel for weeks after this and all they had now was a few hours which they would have to spend dealing with a blackmail. It was intensely unfair. He envied the ordinary couples. No one would be blackmailing them. Every moment of their leave could be spent together, in bed if they wanted. Alone at least, not surrounded by hundreds of people at a London train station.

Still, he thought, glancing surreptitiously at Samuel, secretly worshipping him, it was better than nothing. Samuel glared at him suddenly as though feeling that he was being admired but Harry only grinned, unrepentant. He had stopped trying to hide the fact that he thought Samuel unutterably lovely. He had stopped trying to hide most of his feelings. 

Hiding the past was difficult enough.

The men’s toilets were predictably unpleasant. Samuel went straight for the out of order stall and disappeared inside. Harry chewed his nail anxiously. He felt oddly culpable, as though they were doing something terrible. Which was silly, he told himself. It was the blackmailer who was at fault, not them. It was strange though, that even now he knew that it was Samuel and Gareth being targeted, it still felt as though someone was threatening him. Perhaps he had wound Samuel so tightly into himself that what hurt Samuel, hurt Harry too.

Samuel emerged, looking grim, and nodded. They washed their hands for form’s sake and left.

For the next two hours they positioned themselves within spitting distance of the toilets and watched. Harry wasn’t sure what they were looking for exactly. Did either of them really think that a blackmailer would be obvious, amongst the many men using the facilities for their intended purpose? Did they think a dastardly man in a black cloak would slink towards the door, twirling a moustache and cackling evilly? 

Harry tentatively raised this with Samuel.

Samuel shrugged, eyes not leaving the toilet door. “We’re looking for a man with an air of guilt or unusual expectation.”

“From what Joseph says we would have to go to the gent’s in Hyde Park for that,” Harry remarked. 

“What?”

So Harry told Samuel the story of Joseph’s not very romantic encounter. Samuel blinked for a moment and then burst out laughing. Harry was delighted. Samuel laughing was a wonderful sound and he hadn’t heard it much. 

“That’s marvellous,” Samuel sighed, wiping his eyes. “I can just see the look of horror on Joseph’s stupid face.”

Harry smiled but made a note to explain to Samuel at a future date just what Joseph meant to him. He wasn’t angry though because Samuel’s insults to Joseph, and the world in general, were certainly venomous but, Harry felt, without real underlying malice. They seemed almost a reflex. It was as though Samuel knew no other way to be around people. He was hardly any more pleasant to Gareth. Besides, Joseph wasn’t exactly complimentary about Samuel either. Harry had a sudden, rather depressing, vision of a future (presuming that they all survived the war) where he would be forced to act as a human Maginot Line between his two most important people.

 

Eventually Harry had to point out to Samuel that loitering around the men’s toilets was likely to get them into just the sort of trouble that paying the blackmailer was meant to avert. They were already getting funny looks from policemen and station workers. It didn’t help that Samuel stood out so markedly in the sea of humanity, with his golden hair and movie star face. 

“I suppose you’re right,” Samuel sighed, irritably. He stubbed out a cigarette and coughed. “It could have been any one of a dozen men.” 

They turned and miserably walked towards the exit. 

“No one came out with the bag,” Harry reminded him. 

“Of course not. They’ll have considered the possibility that you and I were waiting and taken the money out. The bag’s probably still in there.”

“Do you want to go back to get it?” The government did keep telling them to be thrifty, after all. It was probably unpatriotic to throw away perfectly good bags. It had looked expensive, too.

“No. It belongs in a toilet. It was my father’s.”

Harry bit his lip. He wanted to ask, truly, but he was starting to understand Samuel. If Samuel was going to elaborate on that comment then he would. Harry asking, or pushing, for a confidence would make no difference and might only annoy. Not to mention the fact that Harry wasn’t sure he wanted to start a conversation about the past in case he was expected to reciprocate. Thus far he hadn’t overtly lied to Samuel, other than by omission. 

And he didn’t want to start now.

So when Samuel said nothing further, Harry didn’t question him.

Outside the sun was setting, earlier than it had for awhile, making it possible for Harry to believe in autumn. It had been an endless summer. Like everyone else he dreaded winter and the long dark nights. The longer the night surely the longer the raid. Last winter the Blitz hadn’t started yet.

This year was going to be different. 

Samuel looked at his watch. “I’ve one hour. Not enough time to get to your lodging house and back. Nor to my flat.”

Harry knew what he was saying. They couldn’t make love (Harry had started to call it that in his head, secretly hoping that it went for Samuel too). There was no time and nowhere to go where they could be alone. He nodded, sadly.

It was all such a letdown.

They hadn’t caught the blackmailer.

And now they couldn’t even touch each other. 

“Damn it,” Samuel said, suddenly, grabbing Harry’s arm and pulling him into a churchyard as they passed it. 

“What are you,” Harry began but then stopped because he was being pushed up against a wall slimy with lichen and damp, and kissed hungrily. He kissed back at once, throwing his arms around Samuel’s back, hoping that no one would be appearing round the corner of the church, hoping that no one was on their way back from tending a grave, hoping that the high walls and the trees and the overhang of the buttress shielded them from prying eyes.

Samuel thrust his tongue into Harry’s mouth.

It sent a spike of memory and need right through Harry’s gut and he moaned.

Samuel tore his mouth away and started kissing the side of his neck, whispering breathlessly in Harry’s ear.

“Want you, Harry.”

“Yes,” Harry gasped, bucking his hips against the hardness he felt in Samuel’s groin. “Oh, yes.”

“Never wanted someone like this,” Samuel hissed, a little angrily, digging his fingers into Harry’s hair, holding his head so that Harry was forced to look him right in the eye. Right into blazing blue. “What did you do?”

“I...,” Harry tried, stupidly. “Nothing.”

“You had better not go with any other man, or any girls,” Samuel warned.

“Of course not! I don’t even want to!” Harry was hurt that Samuel would even ask, but then he remembered how short a time they had known each other. How little they knew of each other.

Samuel nodded, as though he had thought that all along, but he still looked a little threatening. “I don’t like the idea of it. Of you with anyone else. I don’t even like Joseph being around you all the bloody time.”

Harry took a breath. “Do you remember when I called you mine?”

“Yes,” Samuel’s lip titled into a smirk. “It was a wicked presumption on your part.”

“Well, it goes both ways,” Harry told him, earnestly. 

Samuel kissed him again and Harry couldn’t help himself. He pushed a hand down and into Samuel’s trousers and wrapped his fingers around hard flesh and soft skin. He began to pleasure Samuel remorselessly, shamelessly, groaning with excitement every time Samuel grunted or moaned. Harry thought how much better this would be inside him. He caught his breath. 

“Let me down,” he whispered, fiercely.

Samuel, eyes glazed with arousal, released his grip and stepped back a little. Harry turned them around, pushed Samuel against the wall, glanced about to check they were still alone (although, truly, part of him had stopped caring) and got onto his knees on the cold flagstones. Samuel growled in a way almost animal and immediately dug his fingers into Harry’s hair.

Harry unbuttoned Samuel’s trousers.

And licked.

And stroked.

And then he sucked. He let Samuel push hard into his mouth, let him fuck his mouth, all stiff and hot and blissful. Harry had never done this for Samuel before, not right to climax and it excited him beyond words. The sound of Samuel’s pleasure, the tight clench of his fingers, the smell and taste and reality of him. Harry freed his own flesh and began to touch himself. When he did this he felt Samuel twitch and he looked up. Samuel was watching him, watching himself in Harry’s mouth, watching Harry’s hand on his own dick. 

Samuel touched the side of Harry’s face gently.

And Harry thought what a beautiful thing it was, to be on his knees in the dirt.


	14. Chapter 14

Samuel was right, Harry’s room did smell of mould. 

He hadn’t noticed it before, but his senses seemed more acute recently and now the damp smell was bothering him. He lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling. Outside he could hear bicycles, buses, the occasional car but, blessedly, no sirens. He was exhausted, in mind, body and soul and praying to any god who would listen that there wouldn’t be a raid for a few hours. He needed peace. He needed stillness. 

He also needed Samuel, here, now.

Even just smoking and reading the newspaper. 

Even asleep.

It wasn’t the physical part of it that he craved most. It was Samuel. It had been two weeks and Harry felt like part of him had been broken off and was sticking, jagged, through his clothes. He had a nervous notion that he would scratch at people with the uneven edges of where Samuel should be. So he had been avoiding others, except when on duty. 

He sighed. He shouldn’t have drunk all that beer at lunchtime. It had been Joseph’s idea, since it was their day off, but it had only left him morose and feeling unreal. Sort of disjointed and drifting. 

He imagined Samuel flying. He could picture him glaring at the sky as though bearing it a personal grudge. Samuel would be a precise flyer, Harry thought. Nothing flashy or attention seeking. Just flawless skill, and all probably done with a cavalier air of indifference. Harry didn’t think that it was his love talking in these imaginings because the very fact that Samuel was still alive after so many missions was proof that as a pilot he must be something special. 

One day, when the war was over, Harry wanted to fly with Samuel just for fun. He wanted to see Samuel’s world up there, to understand everything that he enjoyed. Harry assumed that Samuel did enjoy flying. He had never said otherwise and usually he was quick to state his dislikes. 

‘You do know that you’re being rather...fixated on him, don’t you?’ Harry’s inner watchman said.

‘Yes.’

‘He could be dead, that letter was a week ago.’

Harry hugged himself in glee at the thought of the letter. It had arrived on a Monday morning. It had smelled of cigarettes and faint exasperation. 

“H,

Since you looked so peeved that I hadn’t written I thought I would do so, just to shut you up next time I’m on leave. I wouldn’t want to leave myself vulnerable to any more womanish reproaches. 

I hope you’re grateful.

I’ve nothing to report except more of the same and I may shut Gareth’s head in a door if he doesn’t stop talking. I just want to read my paper in a civilised manner and smoke my pipe (I’ve taken up the pipe; send tobacco) but he yammers on as if they’re about to ration nonsense and he is determined to use up his surplus first. 

There aren’t enough spoons on the base.

I am trying to get an afternoon to come into London. I would like to continue our exploration of old churches. The last one we visited was very interesting. 

Right, well, I’m bored now and have nothing else to say.

Samuel.

P.S. Don’t forget the tobacco.”

The letter held not an ounce of romance and not one single endearment but its very existence spoke volumes. Samuel had said he didn’t use words well and shown no interest in writing to Harry but he had done it anyway. Because he knew Harry wanted a letter. It made Harry’s mouth smile from either ear just to think of it. 

‘He wrote it because it would make me happy...’ he thought.

The reference to the church also made him happy, but in a different way. It reassured him that Samuel’s frustration was as great as his own. Every night Harry went to bed determined to sleep at once and not indulge in self abuse (he could hear his old nanny now, ‘Master Harry, don’t be dirty! You’ll go blind!’) and every night he endured about three minutes before pushing down his pyjamas and taking himself in hand. 

Harry looked down.

He shouldn’t have thought about that in the afternoon because now he was hard and he simply couldn’t abuse himself in broad daylight. Surely. 

He bit his lip.

Maybe if he was quick. 

He slid a hand downwards and wrapped it around himself. His cheeks flamed with embarrassment, even with nobody to see him. Somehow any number of intimate acts with Samuel left him shamefully unperturbed but this, touching himself alone in his room...Perhaps it was a legacy of boarding school where there had been so little privacy and such dire strictures against such unhealthy practises. It was ironic that he felt more guilty about this than about spreading his legs for Samuel to penetrate him.

Harry felt himself twitch. Samuel...hard and dominant and thrusting deep inside Harry’s body.

Harry’s hand began to stroke quickly.

He pictured the muscles of Samuel’s stomach flexing as his hips moved. 

With a sigh of defeat, Harry kicked his trousers off entirely and spread his legs so that he could reach down and push his finger in, in, in. Where Samuel had been. Where Samuel belonged. 

Harry moaned into his bitten closed lips and stroked and thrust and remembered.

 

Afterwards he was mortified. It must have been the beer at lunch, inducing him to such a thing without even the secrecy of night time to cover it up. 

He worried a little that Karen was watching from heaven. 

Cheeks burning he scuttled guiltily to the bathroom to wash, trying hard not to think about his old nanny.

 

There was a knock at Harry’s door at about tea time. He put down his book.

“Yes?”

Joseph opened the door, and hovered for a moment, looking anxious before managing to spit it out. “Isobel is coming for tea. She wants to meet you.”

“Me? Why?”

“Because I told her you’re my oldest, closest mate and, with my brother out of the picture, the only family I’ve got.”

Harry blushed delightedly. “Joseph, that’s...that’s grand. I would be delighted.”

Joseph mumbled something, looked down at his feet and then shut the door behind him. 

Harry waited.

“I haven’t exactly told her yet, all that stuff,” Joseph finally admitted. “So don’t let on, alright?”

“Of course not. I’m sure you’ll tell her when the right moment presents itself,” Harry soothed. Joseph looked as tense as a bow string, fingers clamped around his cigarette so that Harry wasn’t sure it would even be smokable later. 

“About that...I think it better be soon, ‘coz things is getting serious between her and me and if she thinks I kept stuff from her, big stuff, she’ll cut my dick off.”

Harry winced at the imagery. “I’m sure she wouldn’t...do that. You said she’s a nice, well brought up girl, didn’t you?”

Joseph grinned ruefully, “Yeah but she’s scary when she wants to be. She told me last night that I’m officially off the market. She gave me this look that...well, she meant it, right enough.”

Harry smiled because Joseph was failing to hide his pleasure at being wanted for something more than sex. It might even make him capable of monogamy.

Although it would probably be a daily fought, very close battle. 

“By the sound of it she will take it all in her stride. After all, weren’t you concerned that your class would put her off? Clearly it hasn’t. No doubt she’ll be equally open minded about your ethnicity.” Harry put his book away and stood up. If they were to have a guest to tea, especially such an important one, he wanted to clean the parlour. It was rarely used and he was pretty sure that Samuel’s cigarette butt was still in the grate.

Joseph shrugged, nervously, and ran a hand through his red hair. “I don’t know, Harry. It’s a lot to drop on a lass.”

“I’m sure she’ll appreciate your honesty,” Harry said, without thinking.

Joseph’s eyebrows shot up. Harry reddened. 

They were both thinking that Harry wasn’t one to lecture about honesty. 

Considering everything he was keeping from his lover.

 

By the time the parlour conformed to Harry’s high standards and the tea was on, there was just time to rake together the last of their sweet ration and run to the baker’s two doors down for three painfully small cakes. They were described as ‘sultana’ cakes. 

As far as Harry could see they had precisely one sultana each.

He put them on one of the landlady’s nicest plates (only Harry was trusted with the good porcelain) but somehow they looked worse by the comparison.

Sometimes Harry thought that it wasn’t the drama and the fear and the danger of war that ground a chap down but the day in, day out, remorseless drudgery and greyness of it. He couldn’t help remembering high tea in the old days. Cucumber sandwiches with real butter. Two types of cake, made properly, with fresh eggs and not that frightful yellow powder. And Earl Grey or Darjeeling. 

Oh well.

When the doorbell went Joseph practically jumped out of his skin. Harry smothered a smile. One day, when Joseph was safely married to this girl, Harry planned to tease him relentlessly about the state he was in now. It really wasn’t like Joseph to fall in love. Harry had never thought to see the day but now he had it felt...right somehow. Joseph deserved to be happy.

And would make a wonderful father, Harry reflected happily.

Harry could be an indulgent uncle.

Isobel was beautiful of course, but also charming. Harry liked her at once, liked how she met both his eyes, true and glass, and smiled with her own.

“I’ve wanted to meet you ever since Joseph told me about you,” She said, in a pleasingly rich voice, as Joseph looked on with a moony smile. “I do hope that I pass muster.”

Harry smiled. “Of course!”

“I told you she was a knock-out, didn’t I?” Joseph butted in, proudly.

Isobel blushed, “Joseph!”

They sat down and ate their sad little cakes, and drank their tea and talked about her work in the WAAF, and Harry and Joseph’s work in the fire service, and the pictures (she had been to see ‘Gone with the Wind’ three times but only for Clarke Gable, claiming that she wanted to, ‘give that Scarlett a good kick; she’s no better than she should be!’) 

Harry heard the evening paper come through the door and excused himself to go to retrieve it. Rude though it was he couldn’t leave the casualty lists unchecked for a moment longer than necessary. 

Fortunately Samuel’s name was absent.

Sighing with relief he put the paper down on the table and went to make another cup of tea. He would have to use the same leaves again. They couldn't get any more until next week. Much more of this and it wouldn’t even taste like tea anymore. It resembled beige hot water as it was. 

He was so absorbed in stirring the pot to get the most out of the taste that he didn’t notice the sudden silence behind him where before Joseph and Isobel had been chatting animatedly about Churchill. He turned and saw Joseph staring at the newspaper with such stark rage and horror on his face that Harry caught his breath. Isobel had her hand on Joseph’s arm. She cast worried, uncomprehending eyes at Harry.

Harry sat down.

He carefully took the newspaper from Joseph and scanned for whatever had garnered such a response. He found it wedged in at the bottom of page five, under a letter complaining about the cricket being rained off again.

Youths arrested for vandalising Jewish business.

On Wednesday last two boys, aged fourteen and fifteen, were apprehended outside Alpert’s Haberdashery in Stoke Newington where they had smashed several windows and painted anti-Jewish and anti-foreigner slogans on the walls. Mr Alpert claimed that it was the fifth attack in the last year. “People don’t like foreigners lately,” Mr Alpert told our reporter. “We’ve had threatening letters through the door and rocks through the windows, especially since the bombings started. We’re at our wit’s end.”

Mrs Edna Burbage, who owns the tea shop adjacent to Alpert’s Haberdashers told us, “They bring it on themselves! They never fitted in in our street. Everyone here is Christian and the Alpert’s isn’t. They cook funny smelling food, it stinks the whole street up, and they won’t open the shop on Saturdays. The police ought never to have arrested them lads. It was just high spirits.” 

Harry swallowed.

“Stupid cow!” Joseph hissed, practically shaking with fury. “High spirits my arse! They’ll be setting fires next. I know how it goes. Mum told me once about this happening to my aunt in Germany before the last war. She was pregnant and it frightened her so much that she lost the baby and....” Joseph trailed off because Isobel was staring at him with her mouth open.

Harry didn’t know where to look. 

Perhaps Joseph too would not be drinking beer at lunchtime in future.

 

Harry excused himself quietly but was pretty sure that neither of them noticed him leave. As he closed the door he heard Isobel say,

“Joseph? Are you...are you Jewish?”

Harry later justified what he did next as concern for his friend. He loved Joseph dearly and thought he had some idea of what it would do to him if Isobel rejected him now she knew the truth. Harry wanted to be ready to leap in and console Joseph if it went badly.

This didn’t make it any less appalling that he stood at the door and listened through the thin wood.

“Yes,” he heard Joseph say. Joseph sounded defensive.

“Gosh...I...And German?”

“Half German. Grew up in Yorkshire.”

There was a long silence and then another, “Gosh...”

Harry stood there, forehead pressed to the closed door, practically willing Isobel to be exceptional, to make the leap away from the casual attitudes she would have absorbed in childhood, from the anti-German propaganda in all the papers. From sermons she may have heard in church. From all the rubbish that littered their world.

Not let it tangle in her feet and bring her down.

“Joseph,” she said at last, after what felt like an endless silence, “Have you been afraid of telling me about this?”

Joseph’s failure to speak was oddly expressive.

“Oh Joseph,” she sounded affectionately exasperated. “You silly old thing.”

Harry started beaming with relief.

“So...so you’re not...you don’t...it’s alright?” Joseph’s voice was incredulous.

“Love isn’t something one does in bits. One loves all of the person. How about I make us another cup of tea?”

Harry peeled himself away from the door and went out for a walk. 

When he got back he could hear the gramophone playing suspiciously loudly from Joseph’s room.


	15. Chapter 15

“You’re like a little boy at Christmas, Harry,” Joseph sighed, with a tolerant smile, as Harry fidgeted from foot to foot and checked his watch every minute and a half.

Harry blushed. “I know. It’s terrible, isn’t it? But it’s been three weeks and I’m just so...”

Joseph finished for him, “Just so happy, I reckon. It’s nice. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you happy before.”

Harry hugged himself, gleefully and thought back to the letter. It had arrived the week before. It was very brief and very to the point. It had Samuel all over it, a man who probably wrote letters this short even before the paper shortages.

H,

I’ve got a seventy-two hour leave starting on the 20th. 

See if you can get the same time away. 

Either way I’ll drop by your rat infested dungeon of a lodging house on the first morning.

Samuel.

P.S. Unfortunately Gareth has also got some leave but I’m hoping to distract him with my sweets ration or, failing that, violence.

“I still can’t believe they let you have three days off just because you asked!” Joseph grumbled. They were in the kitchen and Joseph was about to go on duty (they had been switched back to days because no one could handle more than a month on nights without going bonkers, not with all the raids). Harry on the other hand was waiting for Samuel.

“I’m sorry that you have to work,” Harry told him, half his mind on listening for the door. “If it’s any comfort I had to sell my soul to get the time off. I’ll be on double shifts for most of the rest of the month to make up.”

“Humph.”

Although, Harry thought, as Joseph grumped his way out of the door with muttered admonitions against getting carried away with Samuel and ‘breaking your arse,’ the understanding and cooperation of the duty officer probably had more to do with Harry threatening to request a transfer to bomb disposal (such requests were always approved) if he didn’t get his 72 hours and the fire station not wanting to lose one of their two most valuable firemen. Valuable because both he, and Joseph, were fearless in the face of bombs and collapsing buildings and had more experience between them (due to a strange ability to survive) than the entire remaining unit, many of whom were gradually cracking up.

Sometimes Harry wondered how much longer he and Joseph would get away with it. With not cracking up themselves. Horrors mounted upon horrors, day after day, night after night. When Harry closed his eyes he saw only fire. In silence he heard only rubble falling, walls tumbling, sirens, shouting, screaming, that strange noise stone made when it shattered apart from overwhelming heat. London was a burning wasteland as the raids just went on and on, getting longer and more vicious all the time. Hitler had apparently given up on beating the RAF and was now devoting himself to bombing London into submission. 

There had been one night, a week ago, just before Samuel’s letter arrived, when what they had all dreaded had come to pass. A firestorm. Raid induced blazes had combined with unlucky winds to create a self-sustaining conflagration like a living thing made of flame that threatened to blow across the city. When Harry remembered that night he thought of it as hell on earth, made real. Like something dreaded at Sunday School, painted by Hieronymus Bosch. He had spent the hours fighting what felt like a losing battle, drowning in heat so intense that his skin peeled, afraid that he would melt away, trying to douse the fires with one eye always on nearby buildings, sure they would fall upon him at any moment. Truly terrified for the first time that perhaps it would spread past the ability of any human agency to contain and all of London would burn.

It hadn’t. They had beaten it and by the end of that endless night it had been under control. But they all feared a repetition and that next time they wouldn’t be so lucky.

Harry checked his watch again although he wasn’t sure why because Samuel had never told him a time. Just ‘morning’. 

‘Well, it’s morning now,’ he thought, impatiently.

He drummed his fingers on the kitchen table and glanced around for something to do but the place was spotless. He had already reached the limit of what could be done, in terms of cleaning, without actually knocking the building down and starting again. Which was a shame because cleaning soothed him and he was extremely anxious. 

Whenever he saw Samuel part of him was afraid that something would have changed or died away, in the intervening time. All these weeks between meetings, added to the fact that they barely knew each other, added to Harry’s guilty knowledge that he was keeping so much about himself from his lover, made it easy to believe that it wouldn’t last. Samuel might come to his senses. It might fizzle out after a few months. One saw such relationships all the time, since the war began. People were living faster, harder, more intensely than usual and embarking on sexual associations with less caution, fancying themselves in love when really it was just adrenaline and a sense of their own mortality driving them to seek pleasure, to seek out other human beings. Such relationships, if based on nothing more, tended to burn out just as rapidly as they had started. For all Harry knew, they would be the same.

So, when the doorbell rang, Harry felt a little sick with anticipation as well as the happy which Joseph had seen. 

He ran to the door and opened it.

And there he was.

 

It was just as well that no one else was home because Samuel kissed him as soon as the front door was shut and somehow, in a frenzy of tangled hands in clothes, lips and hips colliding and hunger tearing through their skin, they ended up on the floor in the hallway with Samuel on top of him, grinding urgently, and Harry with his legs wrapped around Samuel’s back, crying out. Samuel cursed breathlessly and tore down Harry’s clothes and his own enough to let hard flesh stroke against hard flesh and from there it was like a joyous tumble from a great height, thrusting against each other, kissing, kissing, and Samuel’s hands braced on the floor, and Harry’s hands digging into Samuel’s shoulders and both of them climaxing hard, against each other.

Right there in the hallway. 

On the cold lino.

Panting and very aware of the wetness, slick on his stomach, Harry looked up at Samuel’s pleasure filled, relieved looking eyes and laughed.

“Hello,” he gasped, “Do come in.”

Samuel laughed too and had the grace to look slightly ashamed of himself.

“None of the other lodgers are in, are they?” he asked, standing up and reaching out a hand. Harry took it, and was helped to his feet. His knees felt weak.

“No, although it’s a little late to worry about that now!”

Samuel shrugged and pulled Harry into a hug. They stood there like that for a long time. Just hugging. Letting their frenetic heartbeats slow down. Harry wallowed in the sensation of warm, strong arms around him.

 

Samuel declared that he was hungry and didn’t intend to spend a moment more than necessary in ‘this dump’ so before Harry had been able to do more than clean himself up and stop his head spinning, he found himself in Samuel’s car being driven to Samuel’s apartment. On the way Samuel gave him instruction in properly preparing a pipe. Samuel then proceeded to smoke said pipe, gripping it between his teeth while glaring at the road. Harry watched him, openly. Samuel looked rather wonderful like that, face still somewhat flushed from climax, uniform slightly untidy, pipe smoking furiously as he drove faster than he should, a small frown between his perfect brows.

“Stop staring at me like that,” Samuel said, after a few miles.

“Like what?” Harry asked.

“Like you’re Gareth and I’m a ration book full of stamps.”

They grinned at each other.

 

Samuel’s apartment had been shut up for weeks and smelt stale so Samuel opened windows as Harry put the kettle on. This kitchen was in dire need of his attention, he thought, but he barely had time to plan for future transformation because Samuel’s arms encircled him from behind and Harry became aware that he was being poked, significantly. His heart skipped a beat.

“Again?” He murmured, as a mouth latched onto his neck and a hand slid up under his shirt to flick a hardening nipple. “Already?”

The lips on his skin stretched into a smirk. “What can I say, old thing. It’s been too long.”

“Three weeks,” Harry reminded him.

“Like I said, too long. About three weeks too long. Now, are you going to be a fucking tease or are we going to bed. Unless you fancy the floor again?”

Harry took the kettle off the range and turned. 

“Floor, church wall, bed, garden...anywhere,” he said, quietly, looking into eyes which haunted most of his dreams and which had become entirely too beloved for safety, “You can have me. All of me. On my back. On my stomach. My hands. My mouth. My backside. Anything you want. You only ever have to say the word.”

Samuel caught his breath, his eyes darkened and then he took Harry’s hand and they went to bed. 

This time it was slow and self indulgent. It was exploratory kisses, loving hands, plenty of oil and doing it right so that by the time Samuel slid into him, Harry was slick and open and there wasn’t a breath of pain, only pleasure and hard warmth. Samuel had him on his back and they looked at each other throughout. Samuel watching his face as he gently fucked him. More gently than Harry had known Samuel was capable of. 

Languorous happiness spread out along Harry’s limbs, moving back and forth like a tide, pleasure increasing gradually, sweetly, until they were both moving faster and Samuel had his head on Harry’s shoulder, moaning and it just...happened. Harry said it, more clearly and unequivocally than ever before.

“I love you, I love you, Samuel...”

And Samuel groaned, “Yes, yes, yes,” which Harry was too caught up in orgasm to interpret one way or another but felt perfect at the time. 

Samuel climaxed deep inside him.

They lay silently for some time as Harry became aware of what he had said, and what Samuel hadn’t said. Or, not said exactly. Samuel eased out of him, flopping onto his back with an exhausted sigh, before reaching for his pipe.

They both watched the smoke curl up into the ceiling rose. Harry thought that he preferred the pipe smell to cigarettes.

“Why did you change to a pipe?” he asked, as Samuel crooked an arm around him and pulled him into his side. 

Samuel shrugged. “It’s easier to get loose tobacco at the moment and it goes further this way, than eking out the cigarettes. You can pack the bowl with other stuff and put just enough tobacco in to get a hit. You can’t do the same with cigarettes.”

Harry cast about for something else to say that wasn’t the one question he had on his mind. He would rather die than whine, ‘do you love me?’ to Samuel. Samuel would only go in search of spoons. 

“Are you hungry still? I’ll go and make you something. I’ve got my book. I’ll get some eggs from the shop. Do you want an omelette, or scrambled or,”

“I suppose I’ll have to love you too, if you insist,” Samuel said, suddenly.

Harry’s mouth dropped open. He stared at Samuel who only stared back, a little defiance in his expression as though daring Harry to be sentimental.

“I...I would like that,” Harry managed eventually. His heart was vibrating.

“Hn,” Samuel grunted, shifting his pipe and returning his gaze to the ceiling rose. “Well, it’s dashed inconvenient, this love business. I’m not at all happy about it. But,” Samuel glanced at him, a small smile on his face, “Worse things happen at sea.”

He then dropped his pipe onto the bedside table and tugged Harry down for a long, serious kiss, hands in Harry’s hair.

When he let Harry go Harry was reeling. 

“That’s all settled then,” Samuel nodded, briskly. “Get to it on those eggs, will you. I’m going to read the paper.”

Harry stumbled out of the room, eyes wide, heart singing.

And walked straight into Gareth.

They both blushed crimson. Harry knew he looked thoroughly debauched, even though he’d had the good fortune to dress, and there could be no doubt what he and Samuel had been up to.

“Er...good morning, Gareth.”

“Good mornin’”

They both stared at their feet for a bit.

“I’m going to cook breakfast,” Harry blurted, desperately, when the silence became too much. “Would you like me to do you a portion too?”

Gareth’s eyes lit up. “Yes please! How many eggs have you got?”

“I’ve enough stamps for five eggs,” Harry told him, beginning to relax. 

“Have you got any stamps for bacon?”

“Er...”

“Or chocolate?”

A voice cut across them, coming like a spray of machine gun fire from Samuel’s bedroom, “Stop taking advantage, Gareth.”

Gareth pouted. “I ain’t! But if he’s nice enough to offer and he don’t want them.” Gareth turned his attention back to Harry, an alarming light of hunger in his eyes. “I really want some chocolate, even that ‘orrible grainy stuff would be better than nothing.”

“Don’t make me come out there!” Samuel yelled.

“It’s fine!” Harry said, hastily. “I don’t really use my sweet ration anyway. Unless someone is coming to tea and wants cake. You can have it.”

“Really? You’re brilliant!” Gareth beamed. “I weren’t sure about you at first, because Samuel is extra brilliant and I was worried, but now I’m right happy that you’re his bum boy!”

At which point a naked Samuel emerged from his bedroom, looking like a ancient Greek statue of the God of Rage and tried to beat Gareth to death with a newspaper.

 

Afterwards, after a quick trip to the shops, Harry cooked four portions of scrambled eggs and explained to an aggrieved Gareth that ‘bum boy’ wasn’t a very nice expression, although he appreciated having Gareth’s approval nevertheless. Gareth agreed that, in future, he would be more cautious about using words which he had heard at the base.

“What is a bum boy, anyway?” he asked, as he wired through the proceeds of Harry’s sweets ration. “Does Samuel kiss your bum, or what?”

Harry spluttered, went bright red for the second time in an hour, and was about to tell Gareth that he should ask his parents about such things when he remembered who Gareth’s parents had been and also what was likely to happen if Gareth asked the other available adult, i.e. Samuel. Which left only one alternative. 

So, in record time because the eggs were nearly done, Harry took Gareth on a very embarrassed whistle-stop tour of the Facts of Life, including the less frequently taught, Queer Facts of Life. All the time he prayed that Samuel wouldn’t murder him for doing so.

Gareth’s mouth was hanging open by the end.

“He puts his...up your...?”

“Yes,” Harry mumbled, devoting himself to scrubbing the saucepan so that he didn’t have to look at the boy. Fourteen might be a little young for this conversation but Harry supposed that if you were old enough to ask then you were old enough to know.

“But why?” Gareth asked, tone bewildered. “That sounds bloody awful!”

“It’s not, I promise.”

“Huh...”

Gareth visibly ruminated for a moment. Then, just as Harry picked up the plates of food, Gareth said, quietly. “Do you love ‘im?”

Harry met the boy’s gaze. Found himself staring into serious eyes. 

“Yes,” he replied, simply.

Gareth nodded. “Alright then.”

And that was that.

 

“I think I just got Gareth’s blessing,” Harry said, as the two of them ate their lunch in the bedroom. Gareth had disappeared somewhere with his own two portions. 

“Did you indeed,” Samuel replied. “That’s presumptuous of the little bugger. But just as well really, because it’ll make this afternoon easier.”

“Why, what’s happening this afternoon?”

Samuel sighed. “He’s found his father.”

Harry nearly spat out his eggs in horror. His stomach fell into his feet. “What?”

“Didn’t take him long once he had seen his file and got the bastard’s real name. He’s insisting that we go to see him. I tried everything to stop him but the boy won’t be budged on this. At least I can go with him. You can come too now, if the brat’s taken to you. You’ll just have to pretend that you don’t know the full, revolting truth. Gareth still doesn’t know that I’ve told you his secret.”

Harry stared sightlessly at the suddenly unwanted food on his plate. He would rather stand directly under an air raid bomber than go to see Gareth’s father. But he couldn’t get out of it without looking callous and without losing several precious hours with Samuel. Or without telling Samuel why he didn’t want to meet Gareth’s incestuous father. 

He felt sick.

He would never be free of his past.


	16. Chapter 16

“If you’ll just excuse me for a moment.”

Harry went to the bathroom and locked the door. He had five minutes before they needed to leave for Gareth’s father’s house if they were to be there in time for tea. Gareth was out in the sitting room, a strange ball of excitement, anger, and anxiety, shifting from foot to foot, glancing at his watch and occasionally looking at Samuel. As though Samuel could somehow ensure that it would go well.

As if it could go well!

Harry stared into the mirror over the sink, stared at his own pale face and his ruined eye. Really met his own gaze, which wasn’t something he often did. The breath was fluttering in panic in his chest. 

‘You are a man who lay with his own sister,’ he reminded himself, silently. 

‘You are a man who murdered so many that you’ve never known the exact number.’

‘You murdered people who deserved it.’

‘And people who didn’t.’

‘Did you really think you would be able to keep him?’

Harry had a sick conviction that Samuel would only need to take one look at Gareth’s father to know that Harry shared a sin with him. Or, that Harry’s own behaviour, his own discomfiture, would give away his secret. Once that first secret broke, the other would surely follow. And, while Harry thought that there was an outside chance that Samuel would be able to forgive the sexual crime, he didn’t believe for a moment that Samuel would, or could, forgive Harry for the innocents who choked in houses that Harry had ignited. And neither should he. 

‘I don’t deserve to be forgiven.’

 

“Harry,” Samuel’s impatient voice broke through his frozen reverie. “Have you fallen in? We have to go!”

Harry took a deep, steadying breath and vehemently thought, ‘pull yourself together!’ He washed his hands, wishing he could wash his soul as easily, and left the bathroom with a determined smile plastered onto his face. 

Samuel looked at him oddly for a moment and seemed about to speak but Gareth was hopping up and down with barely contained agitation so before long they were in Samuel’s car. Harry offered to drive, keen for some kind of distraction from the queasy thoughts boiling in his brain, and Samuel shrugged and allowed it. He was still occasionally glancing at Harry as if wondering what was up. Harry knew that he must have a very stiff expression on his face. 

Those wonderful moments in Samuel’s bed seemed a thousand years ago.

Samuel’s love declaration (such as it was) rang hollowly in Harry’s ears. He was sure now that he would never be able to keep that love. The dream that he had been living in, fragile at the best of times, had shattered apart just from the reminder of his past, just at the mention of Robert Telford. 

Harry found that he was missing Joseph’s presence in the back seat quite intensely. He wanted that reassurance, that sense of safety, which Joseph provided. 

So wrapped up in his own thoughts was he that he didn’t notice Gareth’s long, thoughtful silence in the back of the car until it was broken.

“Samuel?”

“Yes?” Samuel was packing the bowl of his pipe, long fingers elegant and precise. Harry was aware of every movement even without watching. 

“Can we tell Harry?”

Harry’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. Samuel hesitated and then resumed the careful picking of tobacco from his pouch. 

“Is that what you want, brat?”

“Yes.” Gareth’s voice was small and it held more than a tinge of shame.

Despite everything Harry felt a little glow that Gareth wanted to confide in him. Perhaps it was a reflection of how important Harry had become to Samuel. 

So Gareth told Harry the story which Harry already knew and Harry had to pretend to be shocked (but not too much) and pitying (but not too much) and he must have walked the tightrope well enough because Gareth, face flaming, didn’t get too upset. 

There was a long silence after.

Then, “Harry?”

“Yes, Gareth?” Harry carefully skirted a large bomb crater in the middle of the road.

“Do you think my mum and dad was barmy?”

Harry swallowed bile. “Only a doctor could confirm that,” he said, trying to sound kind and not defensive. 

“But they weren’t normal, right?” Gareth continued, wretchedly. Harry glanced in the rear view mirror and saw Gareth chewing a fingernail, brown eyes averted from Harry’s gaze. 

Gareth carried such guilt, Harry thought. For things which weren’t his fault. 

“No, they must not have been,” Harry managed. “You will be able to ask your father some questions perhaps?”

“How can I ask him questions!” Gareth exclaimed. “I wanna ask...” he turned and looked out the window at the streets slipping by. “I wanna ask why, why I don’t have no mum. Why I don’t have no home. Why he did it with his own sister. Where he was when I was born. Why my mum ended up dyin’ by herself. If he loved her so much then ‘ow come he let her down when she needed ‘im. Why wasn’t he there?”

Harry suddenly veered the car into the pavement and came to a rattling, screeching stop outside a florist’s. His heart was trying to burst out of his chest. He was hyperventilating. Pure, unadulterated panic was screaming through him and he leaned forward, head on the steering wheel, panting, terrified. 

It was like the old days in the sanatorium. 

He was nothing human, he was a monster. All he was was sin.

And guilt.

Eventually he became aware of firm but gentle hands prising his hands from the steering wheel. He saw dully that he had pierced the leather with his fingernails and that one nail had broken off. He was bleeding. 

Samuel’s voice could be heard telling Gareth to get out of the car for five minutes. 

A door opened and closed.

A long fingered hand was stroking the back of Harry’s neck. Harry sat, sightlessly staring ahead, head bowed a little. 

“What is it?” Samuel asked. “What was that?”

Harry couldn’t lie. “Terror,” he said. His voice sounded cracked. 

“What of?”

Harry tried to reply but failed. Samuel’s arm went round him, at the waist, so that no one outside the car could see, and his hand slipped under the back of Harry’s shirt, began to stroke the small of his back.

“It’s alright,” Samuel told him, calmly. “This sort of thing happens on the base, to some of the pilots. It’s battle fatigue.”

“But I’ve not been in any battles,” Harry mumbled. The kindness of Samuel’s fingers on his skin made him want to cry.

“A fire is an enemy, like any other, and it must be fought,” Samuel told him. 

There were a few minutes where neither spoke and Harry just focussed on slowing his heartbeat. 

“You alright to go on?” Samuel enquired, “It’s not far now and Gareth and I can go in without you. If you’re still feeling a bit rough.”

“No,” Harry heard himself say, “I’m fine now. Let’s go.”

Samuel patted the base of Harry’s spine once, as if for luck, and then withdrew his hand. He motioned to a worried looking Gareth who was lurking outside the car, and the boy got back in.

“Did I do something?” The boy blurted, at once, as Harry started the car.

“No,” Harry soothed, while inside he locked things down enough to imitate a sort of normality. He was good at that. “I just had a difficult week.”

 

They stopped outside a tenement house in a slum area at four in the afternoon. By then Harry had shut down completely and he got out of the car calmly enough and went to the front door. Samuel glanced at him sidelong. Harry felt as if he had poured steel down his spine from sheer will, keeping him rigid when what he wanted to do was to dissolve on the ground and beg forgiveness. 

Gareth took a moment to find the courage to knock on the door. 

Harry watched as though watching a film. 

The door opened and a middle aged, tired looking man with Gareth’s eyes stood there on cracked lino. He looked frightened but also pathetically hopeful.

His eyes locked with his son. For a second they both just stared. Then Robert said,

“David? Son? Is that you?”

Gareth opened his mouth and then shut it. Nodded. 

Robert reached out a hand but quickly withdrew it, and then asked them to come in. 

The house was wretched, evidence of poverty everywhere, in the clothes hanging in the kitchen to dry, in the threadbare upholstery even in the parlour where one always had one’s best things, in the patched and re-patched elbows of Telford’s jacket. Telford led them to the chairs by the empty fireplace and poured them tea. Harry couldn’t help staring at the man. He had never before met another who had done what Harry had. Had crossed the same line. He felt that there ought to be recognition but he only saw a sad man who seemed older than his years and had an desperately earnest way of looking at Gareth that cut Harry to the quick in sympathy. 

Gareth broke the silence. “These are my friends, Samuel and Harry,” he said. His voice was uncertain. He kept picking his cup up and then putting it down without drinking any of it.

“I’m sorry that you gentlemen ‘ave to sit here and I ain’t got anything better to offer you. My wife ain't even here to make the tea proper like. I...um...I haven't told her that David is coming. I wanted to keep it jus' between us for the time being. She's out at 'er volunteer group.” Robert babbled. He was blushing.

“It’s alright,” Harry said. “Pretend we’re not here. We only came to keep Gareth company.”

Robert looked at Samuel, expected him to say something similar perhaps, but Samuel was merely watching him with narrowed eyes. He said nothing. Harry could feel the rage radiating from Samuel. Rage at Robert, no doubt, and what his actions had condemned Gareth to.

“Is my name really David?” Gareth asked.

Robert smiled at him nervously. “Yes, lad. That’s what we decided to call you. They changed it o’ course. And that was prob’ly for the best, right enough.”

And then, as if a dam had broken, Gareth started asking.

“What was my mum like?”

A spasm of pain crossed Robert’s face. Harry’s fingers tightened on his teacup to the point where he could hear cheap porcelain squeaking. 

“She was a good woman. I don’t care what you was told about her. Truth was, she was a good, kind, woman. And clever! She was always reading, day and night. She used to tell me stories when we was kids and she made me laugh and she made me scared of the monsters she thought up. But good scared, you know?” Robert was smiling into the past. “She couldn’t go to school much ‘coz there were nine of us at ‘ome and Ma and Pa needed her to help with the little ones, but she still got books from the lending library. She taught me my letters.”

“Why did...why did you...”

Robert tensed, shot a glance at Samuel and Harry. “That’s a big question lad but you’ve a right to ask it.” He put down his cup and clasped his hands together, looking down at them in his lap. “I’ve asked the same question of meself many a time. I ‘spose all I can say to that is that I loved her and she loved me and I’ve never felt like it was wrong except for what it led to.”

“Me,” Gareth said, miserably, “It led to me.”

Robert looked up, “No! No, lad! I don’t regret nothing about you ‘cepting the hard life you must have had and the fact that they wouldn’t let us keep you. We wanted to keep you, Davey. Ever so much. Your poor mum was crying and crying when they took you away and she cried for weeks after, by all accounts. She told me later when she came to see me in prison. They sent me to prison, you know, for what we ‘ad done. As soon as she got out of the women’s reform ‘ouse she got a place in Islington and come to see me every visiting day. And all she talked about was you and finding you, but I...” Robert stopped and bit his lip. “You got to forgive me, son, but I told her to leave you be. I told her that you was better off with a new name and a new life and that if she tried to get you back you would ‘ave to grow up knowing how you was made. I said that what we had done to you was terrible cruel and we should let you go.”

Gareth was in tears by then, looking like the child that he actually was. Harry wanted to reach out and touch him, hug him, but Samuel was coiled in tense fury beside them and Harry thought that anyone who touched Gareth now would find themselves thrown through the wall by a over-protective fighter pilot. 

“She never forgave me for it,” Robert continued, hands writhing in his lap. “For suggestin’ that we should leave you be. She disappeared. I lost her. I...lost everything. When I got out of prison I looked for her but she had changed her name and I couldn’t find her. Next thing I knew she was...she was dead, in the work’ouse.” Robert’s careworn face contorted. “I let ‘er down, lad. Even more than I let you down, mayhap. I should have fought with her, to get you back. We could have left England, changed our names, or somethin’. We could have been a family. Maybe you would never ‘ave had to know.”

Gareth was shaking a little. “So...so you loved ‘er? She loved you?”

Harry was drowning. And no one could help him.

“Yes, Davey.” Robert looked at his son, eyes suddenly fierce. “Whatever anyone else ‘as said to you over the years, you ‘ave to remember this. You was made with love and you was loved as much as any baby ever was in this world. And still are.”

 

Harry had dragged Samuel out of the parlour, almost forcibly. “They need some time to themselves,” Harry had hissed. “We shouldn’t be in there.” Samuel had put up only a token objection which made Harry wonder if he was as moved as Harry was by Robert’s words. Either way they were intruding on a father son moment and so they went into the kitchen and sat at the scarred table and waited. Harry would have suggested going outside and waiting in the car but Samuel seemed determined to be within earshot of his friend, as though waiting for Gareth to call out to be saved.

Although how Samuel thought that he could save Gareth from the past, was anyone’s guess.

Harry stared around the kitchen, stomach churning at the events of the day, but a little sliver of hope dawning that he was actually going to get out of this unscathed. There had been no moment of recognition or incriminating behaviour to give away his own history. He had controlled himself somehow as Robert told his story, in some ways so similar to Harry’s own, and Samuel would never have to know. Harry was beginning to relax infinitesimally, to look back on his own fear at this meeting and recognise it for the paranoia that it was. Why on earth would Samuel guess Harry’s sins just as a result of meeting Robert?

Emboldened, Harry reached out and touched Samuel’s hand. Samuel started, apparently lost in thought until then, but then smiled faintly and turned his palm uppermost. Their fingers tangled together gently.

Then Samuel’s eyes darkened. “What is...why...” he began, looking bewildered, staring at something behind Harry.

Harry turned.

And saw Samuel’s portmanteau bag.

The one which had held the blackmail money.

Sitting on the sideboard by the sink.

And right at that moment a woman bustled through the back door into the kitchen, saw them, saw them staring at the bag, and froze.

“Where did you get that bag?” Samuel growled, standing up, dominating the room. Harry jumped up and laid a restraining hand on Samuel’s arm. 

The woman gaped like a fish for a moment and then promptly burst out, “Please! Please don’t tell ‘im! I ain’t spent none of the money. You can ‘ave it back! Just don’t tell ‘im!”

“You blackmailing bitch,” Samuel exclaimed. “How dare you. Did Telford put you up to this?”

“No! No! Don’t tell ‘im!” The woman exclaimed, and her fear seemed convincing but Harry thought there was something a little sly about her eyes, watchful even. “He don’t know nothing. It was all my idea ‘coz he told me about the boy and I think it’s disgustin’” She rubbed her eyes hard, glared at them, “Disgustin’ what ‘is sister led a good man into and that boy is disgustin’ too. I wanted to see ‘im, see what he looked like. And I found him at the orphanage. Couple of years ago. I used to go and watch ‘im sometimes. And then you...” she looked at Samuel, eyes flinty, “You took ‘im and let ‘im stay in your house and took ‘im to Devon and I know what rich gentlemen does with handsome lads. It’s filthy.” 

“How is blackmail any better?” Harry asked.

“I never laid a fucking hand on him, you dirty minded fool,” Samuel spat at the same time. 

“I got the idea from a book I was reading. It had letters in it from the blackmailer and I copied ‘em. And it worked! You paid! So you must have been doing somethin’ wrong or else why did you pay?” She stuck her chin out defiantly.

Samuel snapped and lunged at her, mouth open to shout, but Harry pulled him back hard and hissed, “No! Stop! You can’t cause a scene!”

“Why the hell not!” Samuel cried, as the woman, whom Harry assumed must be Robert’s wife, cowered against the sideboard. 

Harry stared anxiously at the parlour door, afraid that father and son might have heard Samuel shouting and would come out to investigate, but no one came. So Harry manhandled Samuel out the kitchen door and into the yard. 

“Get your fucking hands off me, Harry,” Samuel demanded, wrenching his arm free and turning to go back into the kitchen.

Harry slammed a fist into the door just by Samuel’s head and said, “No.”

Samuel hesitated and turned. 

They were both panting.

“You can’t go back in there until you’ve calmed down,” Harry said, more sure of this than he had ever been of anything. “Because if you do you’ll destroy everything for Gareth.”

“He has to know that his father was blackmailing him.”

“He wasn’t. His wife was. She said that he knew nothing and I believe her.”

“Don’t be a fool, Harry.” Samuel’s eyes sparked with anger. “Of course he knew. It’s all a lie, all those soft words and protestations of love. Gareth’s been taken in by a liar and a blackmailer and a dirty pervert.”

Harry swallowed past the agony. And saw, crystal clear, that it had always been coming to this. If he couldn’t convince Samuel now, Samuel would go in and tear down Gareth’s first experience of true happiness, of a family. He would make accusations and because it was Samuel making them Gareth would believe it. And Gareth would lose who Harry believed with every inch of his soul was a good man who wanted to love the boy as a father. 

Harry owed Gareth. He owed Gareth because Gareth could so easily have been his son. And here was Harry’s chance to make what he had done with Karen count for something good.

And the only way...the only way to stop Samuel was...was...

To lose him.

“I believe that Telford knows nothing about the blackmail. I believe he is sincere.” Harry said, slowly. “And I believe that because I understand him...I’m the same as him.”

Samuel blinked, “What are you...”

In the end it was easy. They were only words. “You perhaps feel that a man capable of lying with his sister cannot be capable of any natural, good feelings. You’re wrong. I too fell in love with my sister, and she with me. I loved her so much that when she was raped and killed in Spain during the war, I went mad and burned several villages to the ground. I loved her so much that it destroyed me when she died. And if we had had a son I would have loved him too, with every fibre of my being. I wouldn’t have blackmailed him or his friends, just for money.”

Samuel was just staring at him, eyes wide. 

Harry lowered his hand from the door and stepped back.

“So, you see, I have a special understanding of Robert Telford, and if I tell you that he loves his son and can’t have known what his wife was doing, I hope you’ll bow to my judgement and not burst into that parlour and rip apart whatever tentative beginning they are making in there. Don’t take away Gareth’s chance at peace with himself, with what he is and how he came into the world, unless you are totally sure that you’re right.”

Samuel didn’t speak.

“Are you sure?” Harry insisted. 

“No,” Samuel said, at last. 

They stared at each other for a long time. 

Harry reached out a tentative hand to touch Samuel.

And Samuel flinched.

In disgust.


	17. Chapter 17

Harry had been expecting it but it still sliced right through to his soul when Samuel flinched away from him. He had to close his eyes for a moment to seek control or he thought he might start screaming. 

Which would be ridiculous, he told himself, bleakly. ‘I’ve known him less than two months. This shouldn’t be breaking my heart.’

‘But it is.’

When he opened his eyes Samuel was lighting his pipe, his hands were shaking.

“You fucked your sister,” Samuel said, tone blank, not quite meeting Harry’s gaze.

“I fell in love with my sister and, yes, we had sex. It wasn’t some kind of perverted game, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I don’t know what I’m thinking,” Samuel snapped, inhaling deeply. 

A few streets to the east Harry could hear a factory whistle blowing. It was like a sign of the real world, impossibly far from Harry’s.

“She was killed in Spain,” Harry continued, nothing further to lose now, falling faster and faster like a man who had jumped from the top of a mountain. “And I killed her murderers and set fire to the village we were in with no thought to the innocence or guilt of those I endangered, with no thought at all really. It’s a time I can’t remember clearly. As though it was one long scream. I know I lost my eye in the course of it though, when someone fought back.”

Samuel finally met Harry’s look, his face raw and unguarded. All Harry could see in Samuel’s expression was confusion. Harry’s heart was pounding with reckless desperation. In for a penny, in for a pound...

“You thought I was a gentle sort of person?” He asked, able to hear himself how bitter he sounded. “I’ve got a monster inside me. When someone hurts or threatens the one I love I...I dissolve into anger. I lose control. I lash out in all directions. In Spain I wasn’t even human; I burnt down villages, killed men, women, children. I,”

“Stop,” Samuel breathed, voice cracking with repressed emotion. “Just...stop.”

Harry dashed tears from his face and snapped his mouth shut. He stood in front of Samuel, like a man before a magistrate, and waited.

But Samuel didn’t speak, didn’t pass judgement.

For a long time they just stood there. Harry could see Mrs Telford through the kitchen window as she fidgeted about at the sink, glancing curiously at them from time to time, disgust evident on her face. He could only imagine how that disgust would deepen if she knew what they were talking about. 

“I need you to do something,” Samuel said, at last.

“Anything,” Harry answered. A sad flicker of hope was trying to burrow up his spine. 

“I need you to go.”

The flicker died.

“You’re sending me away from you,” Harry whispered. All defiance gone now.

“I can’t look at you. Not now. I need to think. Go home.” Samuel knocked out the dead tobacco from his pipe against the garden wall. His actions were methodical, automatic. Harry watched every movement, felt every breath. Making a picture of Samuel in his mind that was perfect in every detail, in case that was all he was going to be left with.

“Will I ever see you again?” Harry asked, unable to resist asking although afraid of the answer, like a man with an infection he can’t stop digging his fingers into.

Samuel gave him a straight look. “Maybe not.”

Harry choked back a wretched noise and swallowed hard. He felt as though he should stay and talk, talk, talk. As though he could talk Samuel into still wanting him. But he knew he couldn’t. Samuel would either be able to come to terms with it, or he wouldn’t. Nothing Harry did could change that reality because nothing Harry did could change the past. 

But he couldn’t walk away with saying something. So he stepped as close to Samuel as he dared and Samuel, to his credit, didn’t flinch away this time, only met his eyes, grimly.

“I love you, Samuel,” Harry bent his head and they breathed each other’s air for a terrible, unhappy moment, “With all my heart and soul. I kept things from you but I never lied to you. Everything that we have been to each other was real. I belong to you, even if you don’t want me. Nothing can change that. I will think of you and pray for you for the rest of my life.” 

Harry forced himself to stand back, to not touch him, to not beg. Samuel would greet any further display of emotion with contempt, Harry knew him well enough to be sure of that. So there was nothing for it now but to do as Samuel had asked.

And walk away.

So why wouldn’t Harry’s feet move?

Panic and misery threatened to overwhelm him. His breath was coming too fast again, the adrenaline that had kept him high and brutally honest until now was peaking in his blood and in danger of swamping him. He wanted to curl up in a ball.I’ve lost him I’ve lost him I’ve lost him.

“Harry?”

“Harry? Can you hear me?”

And he was running and there were buses and people and shops and tube trains and rubble and fire in his brain, a melting furnace of colour and movement, and disappointment so intense that it was flaying the skin from his body.

 

“Harry? Can you stand, old chap? It’s me, Joseph.”

Harry blinked and looked up into smoke reddened, familiar eyes. He was sat on the pavement, outside their lodging house. How had he got here? How had he got half way across London? 

It didn’t matter. 

Nothing mattered.

“I’ve lost him,” He said.

Joseph helped him up and started to drag him into the house. It was pitch black. The Black Out wardens were already plying their trade. At some point night had come on. When? 

Joseph kicked the front door shut, made some joke to the landlady as she passed them that Harry had had a few too many beers, and steered him remorselessly up the stairs. Harry just let himself be moved. He was so confused. What time was it? Why did his feet hurt? 

Joseph pushed him down on the bed and shut Harry’s bedroom door firmly behind him. Harry rubbed at gritty, raw, eyes. 

I’ve lost him.

“What happened?” Joseph asked, sitting beside him on the bed, tugging Harry against him. 

Harry turned his face into Joseph’s smoky neck and sobbed.

 

An hour or so later he was lying in Joseph’s arms as Joseph gently stroked his hair and murmured an endless stream of reassurance and affection. As if his voice could reach into Harry’s mind and drown out the lurking despair. Harry thought how, if he’d kept his mouth shut, if things had been different, he would have been in Samuel’s arms right now. 

“Give the poor bugger a chance, Harry,” Joseph said, quietly. “Before you decide it’s all over. He said he wanted to think. Seems to me there’s hope in that. He didn’t just tell you it were done, then and there. That’s something. I reckon he needs time to take it all in. It’s a lot, you know. He ain’t like me. I knew bits and bobs of what you’d done from living with you all these years, from things you yelled in your sleep in the hospital. I ‘ad a head start, if you like. But him...he meets this man and he falls in love and then his man tells him a story like that, sudden like, with no warning. Can’t blame him for wanting you out of his sight for a bit, can you now?”

“No,” Harry mumbled into Joseph’s shoulder. “I don’t blame him.”

“He’s got two more days of leave, ain’t he? Well, maybe he’ll drop by?”

“Joseph, please, please don’t give me hope. It hurts.”

Joseph’s arms tightened around him. “Hope is all there is, Harry. She’s a cruel bitch, is hope, but the alternative don’t bear thinking about.”

“And if he decides that he never wants to see me again?” Harry asked, a cold rock in his stomach. 

“Then you’ll get by, one way or another. We’ll get by, together.” Joseph drew back and smiled sadly down at him. “You won’t be alone, alright? You’ll always have me. And Isobel. And...” Joseph visibly hesitated, “Ah, this ain’t the time I know, but...Harry I just found out today that I’m going to be a dad.”

“You...you are?” Harry felt something other than grief for the first time in hours. 

“Yeah, looks like I got Isobel in trouble.” Joseph looked abashed but proud at the same time. 

“And...well...there’s going to be a wedding tomorrow. If you’re up to it. I mean...I was going to ask if you could see your way clear to...er...be my best man?”

“Oh, Joseph...”

“Ain’t no one I’d rather have, Harry. Even if I had time to find my brother I’d still want it to be you. And Isobel wants it too.”

Harry only nodded and buried his face in Joseph’s now soggy shirt.

 

Somehow, and only because it was Joseph, Harry found the strength the next afternoon to get out of bed and dress in his best suit. His movements felt slow and strange but otherwise he was calm, in a numbed sort of way. He washed his face. He combed his hair. He stared at himself in the bathroom mirror for awhile, marvelling at how swollen his eye was. He decided to tell Isobel that he had a cold. He was determined not to ruin her day. She was probably already a bit disappointed that this was her wedding. No church, no extended family, no reception in a tent in the garden. There was no time for any of that so she would be having the wedding a lot of woman were having recently.

A quick, economical one.

Still, Harry thought, when he left to look for the groom and found him humming to himself in the kitchen, trying to tie his tie, Isobel was a very lucky woman nevertheless. Joseph was palpably nervous, his shaking hands unable to make the knot, but his eyes had an unfocused, happy look that made Harry ache. 

Harry gently slapped Joseph’s hand away and did his tie for him.

Joseph smiled at him. “It’s a funny old life, ain’t it?” he said. “If you’d told me six months ago that I would be getting married, and not at the point of a rifle, I would have laughed meself sick. And then been sick from horror of it.”

Harry felt his lips tug up into a smile despite himself. 

“We all live very fast now,” he observed. “We change as we need to.”

“Harry...do you reckon I can?”

Harry looked up at him. Joseph was biting his lip.

“Can you what?” He asked. He wanted to say, why are you asking me for advice? What wisdom do you think I have?Haven’t you seen what I’ve done to my own life?

“Can I change? Can I be a steady husband, and father? Can I be faithful and reliable? I never thought about it before. I was happy enough, going girl to girl. Less than a month ago I was still seeing other women. But now...” Joseph’s anxiety was writ large on his handsome face.

Harry swallowed. The truth was that only time would tell. Like so many couples Isobel and Joseph hardly knew each other but were embarking on marriage anyway. Harry suspected that the future would see a lot of divorces. He hoped and prayed that Joseph wouldn’t be one of them. 

“It has all happened very quickly. You’ll have to get used to each other. There’ll be hard times,” he said, eventually. “And you’ll need to resist temptation. There’ll be times you’ll look back on your bachelor days with regret, when there is a crying baby in the bedroom and a irritable, tired wife. But...but I think all you’ve ever wanted is to be loved, Joseph. And she loves you. And when your child is born that child will love you too, more than you have ever been loved. Because you’ll be someone’s father. I envy you that.”

Joseph stared at him for a moment and then hugged him fiercely. 

 

Isobel was glowing. She was wearing her WAAF uniform, having had no time to save up coupons for a wedding dress, but somehow she wore it like the finest silk. Harry told her she was beautiful and she blushed and smiled and took Joseph’s arm. Nearby two middle aged people were looking on, their eyes dazed. Isobel ushered them forwards and said,

“Mama, Papa, this is Joseph.”

Harry saw Joseph tense at once, possibly dreading an interrogation about his prospects, his education, his background, about what made him think he could marry a nice, posh girl from Hertfordshire. But there was no time for all that since the special license weddings were moving briskly through the council offices and they might be called for their turn at any moment. Isobel’s parents merely shook hands with Joseph and they all chatted a little awkwardly until it was time.

The wedding itself was over in less than fifteen minutes. Most of the couples waiting were in uniform, one or both of them, and Harry wondered how many were marrying because the groom was about to be shipped off to the front line. He wondered how many of these pretty, hopeful, women with flowers in their hair and shy little smiles, would be widows by the end of the year. 

It was as though they were all being blown into the future by the bombs and the horrors, and these weddings were acts of defiance. 

Acts of faith.

After the wedding they went to the nearest pub and Harry helped Isobel keep the bewildered parents in the conversation, carefully redirecting any topic that could lead to revelations that would be better made at another time. Harry knew instinctively that Joseph would have an easier time being accepted by Isobel’s family if the wedding day went without a hitch. The truth about Joseph’s heritage ought to be kept for the future. In fact, Harry planned to advise Isobel not to tell her parents at all until the baby was born. With any luck her parents would be so moony over their first grandchild that the shock would be significantly softened. 

Perhaps if Harry had planned similarly with Samuel, rather than having to blurt it out suddenly, it would have been better for him too.

Samuel...

Harry stared at his drink. Every moment that went by he felt further from him, felt that there was less chance of Samuel forgiving him. He was sure that if Samuel went back to base the next day without having made his mind up to love Harry anyway, that there would be no hope at all. Time would pass and Samuel would forget him. 

 

Isobel’s parents left at nine o clock, needing to catch the last train back home, and Joseph offered to walk them to the station. Harry and Isobel were left alone for awhile. 

“You look tired,” Harry said, smiling. “But happy.”

Isobel grinned, impishly. “I am happy. It’s madness, I know, but I fell in love with Joseph that first night. Now I get to keep him forever. If I can!”

“He’s a good man. You’ll be happy.” Harry sipped at his beer. 

“I hope so. I know it won’t be easy. But what about you, Harry? You seem...different. Sad. Are you alright?” She regarded him with kind brown eyes and Harry had to swallow a lump in his throat.

“I just...I just had a terrible quarrel with my sweetheart. It might be all over.” He couldn’t look at her. She was so happy. She had got her man. A tiny, unworthy, part of him resented her for that. Why couldn’t he be as happy as her? 

“I’m sorry to hear that, Harry. But I can’t believe she’ll stay angry with you forever! Joseph says you’re the best of men. He looks up to you. I’m sure your sweetheart knows how lucky she is, to be with a fellow like that.” Isobel patted his arm.

Harry forced a smile.

 

Later that night Harry lay in bed and tried not to listen to the soft laughter and little gasps coming from Joseph’s room on the other side of the wall. Something inside Harry was being scraped raw with jealousy. He wanted that, what they had. He wanted. 

He wanted Samuel.

 

When he woke the next day, the final day of his holiday, he knew he couldn’t endure any more lolling wretchedly in bed. So he got up and did housework. 

He did housework like it was an act of penance which would cleanse him of all his sins. 

He washed his bed sheets. 

He blacked the grates.

He cleaned the windows, front and back.

He weeded between the flagstones in the yard, even though it meant moving ancient rusted bicycles, empty rabbit hutches and an old spring mattress. 

He found a sort of peace as always in the mindless rhythms of cleaning and scrubbing and polishing and brushing. So he was lost in his thoughts, a million miles away, on his hands and knees doing the front doorstep, when a voice said,

“I’ve finished thinking.”

Harry dropped his brush and looked up into Samuel’s tired eyes. His heart jumped into his throat. 

For a moment he froze, unable to move, unable to speak and eventually Samuel had to sigh and add,

“Are you going to keep me out here all day?”

Wordlessly, Harry stood up and motioned him indoors. They went at once to Harry’s room. Harry rubbed at his hands, trying to clean soap and grit and grime from them, and watched Samuel as he sat down on Harry’s bed. Harry was in a quandary. Should he sit down too? Would that be presumptuous? Too intimate?

“So,” he managed, when the waiting became unendurable. 

“So,” Samuel nodded. For once he wasn’t fiddling with his pipe and instead was just sitting. 

Harry gulped.

“Here’s how it’s going to be,” Samuel told him, briskly. “We went too fast. I see that now. We lost our heads rather. We ought to slow right down and be sensible about things.”

Harry could hardly breathe. “You still...you still...?”

Samuel hesitated. “We’ll have to see, won’t we? We shall start again, from the beginning, with no secrets this time. And then we’ll know. I can’t promise you anything.”

Harry opened and closed his mouth, not sure that this wasn’t some sort of wonderful dream. 

“That was a hell of a thing you told me,” Samuel said. “But then I had to drive Gareth home and listen to him burbling about his father and I saw that you were right. Telford can’t have known about the blackmail. Telford really does seem to have sincerely loved Gareth’s mother, the poor fool. So perhaps it was the same with you. Lord knows we don’t always get to chose the people we would prefer to fall for.” Samuel’s eyes dropped to the floorboards. “But the killing. That nearly stopped me coming here. What you did in Spain was an almighty sin.”

“Yes,” Harry said. “I can’t be forgiven for it. Not even by you. I can’t make my peace with it.”

“Then don’t try,” Samuel told him. He looked up. “Don’t look for forgiveness that could never be earned. Only live. And try to live well.”

Harry caught his breath and before he knew it he had stumbled forward and was on his knees, head in Samuel’s lap and Samuel was touching his hair.

“Only live,” Samuel whispered.

 

They didn’t make love that day. It was too soon for that. Samuel was still chary of touching him and Harry didn’t want to push too far or too fast and perhaps endanger this fragile beginning. 

Anyway, his heart was singing. He didn’t need anything else to make him happy. Just spending the last few hours of Samuel’s leave together, talking quietly, drinking tea, walking in the park, was more than Harry had dared to hope for even a day before. He was looking at Samuel with new eyes, loving him more than ever, for being a greater man than Harry had known. For being able to give him a chance. Even now. Even with the truth lying between them in all its ugliness. 

They didn’t even kiss goodbye when it was time for Samuel to go. Harry couldn’t help contrasting this farewell with their others, preceded as they had all been, with passion, with lustful hands. This time they just walked to Samuel’s car and Samuel nodded. And Harry smiled faintly. And Samuel drove away.

But it was a start.

 

A week later Harry was humming and making supper when there was a knock at the door. He sighed. If that was Joseph having forgotten his key again. But it wasn’t Joseph.

It was Gareth.

And Gareth was in tears.

Harry’s heart started to freeze. No. Not after everything...please, please no.

Gareth threw himself into Harry’s arms, sobbing inconsolably. Harry fought an urge to shake him and shout.

“What is it? What is it?” he asked, pulling the boy into the hallway, trying to prise him off. 

Gareth made a noise like a wounded animal, trembling from head to foot. He shook his head, as though words couldn’t come. 

“Gareth, Gareth please. You’re frightening me,” Harry whispered. 

Gareth gulped and raised a snotty, blood shot eyed, face to Harry’s. “He’s been shot down, Harry.”

Harry’s knees went and they both collapsed in a heap on the hallway floor. 

“He’s...he’s dead?” Harry asked, hearing his voice from many miles away. Everything was suddenly very bright and clear and hard. He could hear the traffic in the street outside. He could smell supper burning in the kitchen. He could hear someone upstairs in the bathroom hitting the plumbing.

“Don’t know, Harry. Don’t know,” Gareth cried. “One of t’other pilots saw his plane go down over Calais but didn’t see it burning so maybe he got out. Maybe he’s been taken prisoner.”

Harry mindlessly put his arms around Gareth and began to rock them both to and fro, to and fro. “Then we have to hope, my boy. We have to hope we’ll hear something.”

Gareth nodded and resumed breathless, distraught, sobs.

I have to hope.


	18. Chapter 18

Harry went to the base with Gareth and interrogated every flyer who had been on Samuel’s final sortie with him, interrogated them with a ferocity that eventually prompted the RAF to ban him from forces property. It made no difference. The other pilots had seen nothing but the plane going down. Samuel had been declared missing in action. 

Harry’s heart had stopped beating. It hung in his chest like something made of lead and he was dully surprised to find that he could still walk and talk and breathe. The only thing keeping him going was that no one had seen the plane actually crash.

It gave Harry a dangerous sort of desperate hope, a hope, which as the months passed with no word, became agonising. He had never known before what terrible suffering hope could inspire. It made it impossible for him to stop, to grieve, to lose his mind, all of which would have been some kind of ending at least. 

For Gareth too.

Gareth was the other thing preventing Harry from simply closing the door of his bedroom and drawing the curtains and never again speaking to another soul. Gareth’s fear, his pathetic refusal to even countenance the possibility of Samuel’s death, cut through to Harry’s bones. Faced with this thing, this doubt, this yawning chasm of uncertainty, Harry and Gareth drew together. No one else could understand. Gareth started to turn up at the lodging house on his days off. He would sit near Harry, talking a mile a minute about any other subject, but glancing at Harry sometimes. As though checking he was still there.

And Harry stepped into the role that he thought Samuel might have wanted someone to take. He kept an eye on Gareth. Made sure he ate healthily (as far as was possible in the circumstances), made sure he remained on the ground crew and wasn’t sent on missions. Doing the latter required him to blackmail the authorities, at one point by threatening to go to the papers with the story of how old Gareth actually was. The RAF didn’t want to lose Gareth, his engineering skills were unsurpassed in his unit, so they accepted, angrily, any reprimand Harry issued. Especially when he thought that they were over-working the lad. 

Every day Harry checked the papers, and the post. Once a week he went to the Ministry, sometimes with Gareth in tow, and asked if there had been any news. The nice (and to Harry’s mind, dangerously useless) young lady behind the counter always shook her head sadly. Harry would nod briskly and walk away. 

At night he lay in bed and made himself not remember, not think. 

On duty he did what was necessary.

At home he cooked.

He cleaned.

He didn’t feel, didn’t cry, didn’t live. 

And time passed.

 

One Saturday afternoon in February 1941 they were in the tiny kitchen of the house which Harry (at their insistence) now shared with Joseph and his wife, while Harry cooked dinner and Gareth played Snakes and Ladders with Isobel. Joseph was smoking in the yard because Isobel was sick when she smelt cigarettes. Harry could see him through the kitchen window, shivering slightly, and staring up at the sky. Harry knew that Joseph was equally delighted and terrified of the prospect of fatherhood. He would occasionally go very quiet and start worrying. At Christmas he had got blind drunk and as Harry held back red hair Joseph had asked him, between sessions of vomiting, whether Harry thought that someone who had never had a good family could make one or whether he would just be the same disaster all over again. 

“Will I be my step-mum? Will the poor little bastard end up hating me?” Joseph had demanded, slurring.

“No one is doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past unless they chose to,” Harry had told him, as gently as he could. “You aren’t your mother.”

But Joseph still thought about it, Harry could tell.

“Ouch!” Isobel said, suddenly.

Harry turned. “Everything alright?”

Isobel nodded, smiling, and patted her now very obvious belly. “The baby just kicked my knitting right off my stomach!”

Gareth’s eyes were like saucers.

“Oh! There he goes again!” Isobel laughed breathlessly. “Do you want to feel it, Gareth?”

Gareth hesitated. He had a tendency to treat Isobel as though she was an unexploded bomb, apparently convinced that he was going to do something wrong, perhaps inadvertently upset her and make her ill. He glanced at Harry for reassurance.

Harry nodded.

Tentatively Gareth reached out and Isobel took his hand and placed it on her stomach. They waited for a moment. 

Then Isobel giggled and Gareth snatched back his hand like he’d been shot.

“Is it angry or somethin’?” Gareth asked.

Isobel shrugged. “I don’t know. Perhaps he is just bored and stretching his legs.”

Gareth put his hand back on her stomach and soon they were both chuckling helplessly. Joseph came back into the kitchen in a blast of cold air and raised an eyebrow.

“Unhand my wife, brat.”

Gareth started blushing. “Sorry! It was her idea!”

Joseph snorted and joined Harry at the range. Harry was stirring stew. He quite liked the way the spoon went round and round, smooth and predictable. 

“How’s tricks, Harry?” Joseph asked, leaning against the sink.

Harry got some bowls down from the cupboard. “I’m fine thank you, Joseph.”

Joseph sighed. “I’m worried about you,” he continued, quietly. Behind them Isobel and Gareth were arguing over whether Gareth had thrown a six or a two. There was some mystery since the cat had just eaten the dice. No one was quite sure where the cat had come from except that it had moved in soon after they had and seemed unwilling to move out again. They had all decided to accept the situation. It was a bog-standard moggy but with an unusually long, thin face and very sharp teeth. So Gareth had called him Dragon.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” Harry told him. 

“You don’t smile much. You don’t eat much. I just,”

The doorbell went then and Gareth shot up to answer it. Ever since Samuel had gone missing Gareth was the first to answer all doorbells and ringing phones and you couldn’t stop him opening letters even if they weren’t addressed to him. 

“Harry!” Gareth yelled from the hallway.

Harry froze, then dropped the spoon and ran to the door. Standing there was the young woman from the Ministry. She was smiling. She was holding letters.

“The Red Cross found him,” she said. “He’s alright. He’s in a POW camp in Poland. They even got two letters from him. One is for Gareth, one is for you.” She blushed. It had become clear months ago that Harry and Samuel couldn’t possibly be ‘just’ friends.

Gareth rudely snatched his letter right out of her hand and ran off with it, wordless for once.

Harry took his own letter. Stared at it. He’d had so many dreams like this, so many fantasies. It didn’t feel real now that it was happening. “What are the conditions in the camps?” He asked her, quietly.

She looked bemused. Maybe she was wondering why he wasn’t showing relief. Or any emotion at all.

“Oh. Well, pretty bad, by all accounts. The Red Cross can get in sometimes. They adhere to the Geneva Convention. But we hear that food is quite scarce and the regime is harsh. We haven’t a lot of information about the camps, I’m sorry.”

Harry nodded and shut the door in her face. Later he would feel bad about doing that when she had come such a long way on a Saturday just to give him the news. But right at that moment all Harry was thinking was, ‘How can I get to Poland?’

Harry went back into the kitchen. Joseph took one look at the expression on Harry’s face and immediately said, “Isobel, go upstairs.”

“But,”

“Now, Isobel.”

Grumbling a little, she went. Harry was aware of this as something on the edge of his vision. 

“He’s in Poland. He’s probably starving. I have to go to Poland,” he said. He was very calm. 

“No.” Joseph stepped forward.

Harry frowned. Why would Joseph say that? Why would Joseph get in his way? Harry decided to make one attempt only to explain and then he would just have to do whatever was necessary to get to Samuel. Time was a factor. 

“I have to go to Poland,” he repeated. “Samuel’s not dead. But he’s not safe out there. I have to go and bring him back.”

“You have to go into occupied Europe? By yourself? Fuck,” Joseph said, grimly, “I was afraid of this.”

Then, out of nowhere, he punched Harry hard in the face and yelled, “Gareth!”

The world exploded. 

 

Harry opened his eyes. There was a heavy weight on his chest. He looked up. Worried, slightly frightened, brown eyes looked down at him. Gareth. Something bright red dripped onto Harry’s face. He blinked.

“Gareth? Why is your nose bleeding?”

“Because you threw me at the wall, Harry.”

Cold horror began to slither in Harry’s gut. “Joseph? Joseph!” he cried.

“It’s alright,” Joseph swam into his vision. He was also bleeding, and his face was swelling in various places.

“Did I...? Did I...?” Harry panted, praying to be told otherwise. Panic was queen.

“You did, right enough.” Joseph nodded. “It was a good thing that Gareth was here ‘coz I don’t reckon I could have stopped you by myself.”

“Joseph...Gareth...I...I am so sorry, so sorry,” Harry was crying and it hurt because he wanted to gulp in deep breaths but couldn’t with Gareth sat on him. Everything hurt.

“Now that all that crap is out of the way, do you want to read your letter?” Joseph asked, coolly.

Letter? Oh, yes! “Yes, yes please.”

“Is it alright if I get off him?” Gareth asked Joseph, doubtfully. Joseph regarded Harry thoughtfully.

“Yeah, I think so.”

Gareth looked as though he wasn’t at all convinced and tensed before quickly springing away. He then proceeded to regard Harry with suspicious eyes from the doorway. Harry sat up, only realising then that he had a broken rib. He yelped and clutched his chest. 

“Yeah, that will have been the chair I hit you with,” Joseph told him, handing Harry the letter. “Don’t expect an apology because you won’t get none. And I am looking forward to you buying me another chair.”

Harry flushed with shame. 

And, grateful to have a reason to not look either of them in the eye for a moment, he opened the letter. And read.

Harry,

Send books. Sod food, I want books. The Red Cross seem to be able to manage occasional parcels and letters. Send books with them.

As you presumably know by now I got shot down in France last October. The plane was a write-off. I hid in and around Calais for a bit but got caught soon enough. Rather wish I had learnt French at school. It would have been a bloody sight more use than Latin. I swore at someone in English and that’s what gave me away. 

Being a POW is a frightful bore, you can’t imagine. Food is appalling. Nothing to do. Surrounded by idiots. I would tell you more but it would get censored and I’m not giving them the satisfaction of getting the black marker out. Except for this, the camp commandant is complete and utter [a long line had been angrily blacked out here]. Ha. Worth it.

Harry, we left things in a bit of mess, didn’t we? Not much clear, one way or the other. I can’t say that I’ve had some certainty drop out of the sky since then (all that drops out of the sky round here is bombs, and I tell you it’s a trifle galling being accidentally bombed by your own side). 

But that’s not the main thing on my mind. I keep thinking of Spain and wondering how you’ll react when you find out where I am. 

Am I to expect a ravening horde of one to appear over the horizon?

Well, I’ll tell you this for nothing, don’t expect me to forgive you if you do. If you take that path, I know it’s the easy path for you, and assuming you don’t get yourself killed in the process, I won’t be hanging about. We’ll be done. 

Don’t come after me. Don’t save me. I don’t need saving. 

Instead, do the harder thing. Wait. I don’t say ‘wait for me’ because I can’t promise that I’ll want anything to do with you after the war, when I get home. Just wait. 

You had rather learn that endurance is a better thing than rage. God knows I’m enduring out here. Remember our conversation about the last war where we felt sorry for those daft buggers who sat in France for four years, in the trenches? Well, here I am. Sat in Poland. While the greatest war in history is fought, and I can’t do a damn thing. I’m useless. I raged about that for three months before I started thinking that endurance is going to have to be my war now.

Whether I like it or not. And I don’t fucking like it.

It’s going to have to be your war too.

You can write to me, if you like. Keep an eye on Gareth (I suspect that you already are) and don’t let the boy get himself killed. Tell him if he does he’ll have me to answer to. 

Samuel

P.S. Books.

Harry stared at the paper, distantly conscious that Joseph and Gareth were watching him like hawks, poised to move if Harry showed any sign of losing control. 

Wait. Samuel said wait. He promised nothing except that if Harry tried to do anything else, he would lose Samuel finally and irrevocably. 

‘I can’t save him or I’ll lose him,’ Harry thought.

And all the rage and purpose and incipient wild madness drained out of him.

And he hugged the letter and bent his head.

Wait.

I’ll have to wait.

 

September 1945

 

Harry tapped his foot nervously and checked the clock again. Twelve fifteen. Bloody train was late. Of course, of course, five years of waiting was hardly going to end on time. He didn’t have that kind of luck. He felt sick. The people around him were talking, laughing, the buzz of V.E. day still hadn’t faded (although there was grumbling now about the continuing rationing) and people were moving with lighter steps. In particular it was good to know that no bombs would be falling. Ever again. Harry and Joseph were going to have to look for jobs soon. London no longer needed such a large fire service. 

Harry looked at his watch again. 

Gareth tugged his arm and pointed at a tobacco stand. “Let’s get ‘im a new pipe, Harry? I’ve got some money left from what Dad gave me.”

“Good idea,” Harry nodded, and watched as Gareth bounded over to the stand, twinkled at the girl who worked there, and proceeded to buy Samuel a home-coming pipe. Harry smiled a little. Gareth, nineteen, but still a cheerful ball of enthusiasm and curiosity. He had hardly changed at all except that he had a found a little peace in building a relationship with his father, a peace which Harry had never jeopardised by telling Gareth about what his step-mother had done. And she had had the sense to keep her mouth shut too, kept her opinions to herself about Gareth and his origin and how revolting she thought the whole thing. Harry had made it very clear that she would regret it if Gareth got even a hint that she didn’t want him in her husband’s life. 

She had even returned the money and Harry had used it to send Samuel books.

He had written to Samuel every week for five years. Some of the letters got through, some didn’t. Very few had got through over the last six months as the Germans retreated and things descended into chaos. Harry had been reduced to checking the newspapers to find out if Samuel’s current camp had been liberated yet. Finally The Times said that it had been reached by a Canadian unit in July. Harry hadn’t slept for worry. What if Samuel had been ill? What if he had run into trouble on the journey back to England? What if, what if... In a way he had been safe in the camp. But after liberation he was going to have to get home, through what was, by all accounts, the near-total lawlessness of Europe.

But then, two days before, Harry had received a telegram saying that Samuel had been shipped back and would be arriving at Waterloo station by the noon train.

Harry checked his watch again.

Twelve twenty. 

He was trying very hard not to think about the future, about whether Samuel had any feelings left for him at all after so long, after going through so much. Harry himself loved Samuel every bit as much now as he had in that long ago summer. For him nothing had changed, even after five years without him. Five years of war and death, and lost friends, and bleak unrelenting economising. Five years of horrors in the newspapers. 

Although there had been good things too. Joseph and Isobel were still together and still loved each other (although, as predicted, there had been some very hard times and both had had to learn to compromise) and had one four year old boy called Tom, and another baby on the way. Harry had long since moved out and into Samuel’s flat (with permission) because there simply wasn’t room for them all in the tiny house.

And that was another thing. Harry wasn’t sure he was going to have anywhere to live soon. Samuel might well want his flat back, without Harry in it.

He might want his life, without Harry in it.

Harry chewed at his lip, tasted blood, and forced himself to stop chewing. 

Gareth bounded back, grasping a paper wrapped package. “He’s bloody late, ain’t he!”

“Yes,” Harry replied, faintly. 

And then, as if it was just an ordinary thing, there he was. Walking up the platform.

Harry’s heart tried to burst. Gareth ran forward whooping and enveloped Samuel in a forcible hug, laughing his head off and simultaneously crying his eyes out. Samuel endured this appalling display for a moment before firmly pushing Gareth off him, whereupon a beaming Gareth presented him with his pipe and Samuel thanked him solemnly. They smiled at each other for a moment.

Then Samuel looked up. 

Harry stumbled forward. Close to he could see at once how very thin Samuel had got. It made him ache to see Samuel so thin. And he looked so tired. 

“Harry,” Samuel nodded.

“Sam,” Harry felt himself blushing. After all this time he suddenly wasn’t at all sure what to say. So he took refuge in practicalities. “You must be exhausted. Would you like to go home?”

Something passed over Samuel’s face, something profound. “Yes, I want to go home. Have you got the car?”

“Yes, and I’ve got some time off and,”

“Take me to Devon.”

“Devon?” Harry was stunned.

“Yes. Home. If you please.”

There was something raw and slightly desperate in Samuel’s gaze. Harry nodded and at once led them to the exit. At the car Gareth had to leave them because, unlike Harry, he had been unable to get time off. But just knowing that Samuel was back in England and alright seemed to be enough for Gareth for the time being. He hugged Samuel again.

“For fuck’s sake...” Samuel muttered. “Just don’t start crying again, I beg of you.”

Gareth grinned at him and then they were in the car and he was waving them off. 

And somehow in less than five minutes Harry had got into the surreal position of being alone in a car with Samuel, driving to Devon. 

“Why...why Devon?” Harry asked. “Wouldn’t you rather rest for a few days at the flat? It’s a long drive and you look tired.”

“It has to be Devon. This was my plan.” Samuel was staring out the window at the craters and dusty ruins of the city. “I’ve spent the last five years deciding exactly what I would do on my first day back and I am going home. Real home. Not London. I may not have had a childhood full of rainbows and bunnies and I may not like the house itself much but it’s still home. I need to see it.”

Harry thought he understood. He couldn’t imagine how many hours Samuel had spent imagining this day. He wanted it to be exactly as Samuel had dreamed it.

Samuel fell asleep soon after they started driving and Harry was left to his own company for the hours it took to get there. He didn’t mind. He kept looking over at Samuel asleep next to him and feeling utter, bone deep, happiness that Samuel was alive and here. At last. It was an anti climax but he had been expecting that. Everyone said the same since the war ended. It had been a surprise for some people to find that life wasn’t actually perfect suddenly, just because it was over. That life went on as usual and wasn’t like the end of a romantic film. Harry however had never thought that Samuel would stride up the platform and throw himself into Harry’s arms.

For a start, it was Samuel. It would take more than a world war to make Samuel romantic. 

Assuming that he had any romantic feelings for Harry at all now.

 

When they drew up in front of the house Harry leaned across and stroked the hair out of Samuel’s eyes.

“Samuel,” he said, quietly. “You’re home.”

Samuel opened his eyes, looked at Harry for a moment, and then straightened. He stared out of the windscreen at the house, bathed in late summer light, looking much as it had the last time Harry had been here. With Samuel. All those years ago when they had first made love. Harry stamped on that thought at quickly as he could. That association wasn’t why Samuel had asked to come here and it was selfish of Harry to bring it all back to his overriding obsession, to the one question rolling around his brain.

Will we be together?

Samuel was greeted as a prodigal son by the staff. They must also have received a telegram because they seemed to be expecting him. There was an early supper ready in the dining room and Samuel’s room had been aired. 

They weren’t however expecting Harry and there was a lot of running around upstairs before he was ushered to a guest room to change for supper.

It was the same room as before. Harry shut the door on the cheerful chambermaid and nearly slumped down on his backside. It was almost unbearable to be in this room, where they had first...and not to know if there was any chance, any hope. Samuel so far hadn’t behaved as though they were lovers. But neither was he acting as though he despised Harry. Samuel wasn’t doing much of anything.

Harry sighed and washed and dressed, not looking at the bed, not remembering.

 

He wandered the house, thinking how the lowering evening light was making it warm, making the wooden fittings glow, where it crept in through the windows. It was like a dream. He found Samuel stood on a landing where there was a large window. Samuel didn’t seem to hear him approach. He was staring out at the park, running his fingers over the leads. 

And he was crying.

Harry caught his breath and stopped. He should go. He should pretend he had never seen this. This was private. Samuel wouldn’t want anyone to see him like this. 

He hadn’t even known that Samuel was capable of tears.

Just as he was about to back away silently, Samuel turned his head and looked at him and Harry broke. He ran forward and pulled Samuel into his arms and held him as tight as he could.

And Samuel put his arms around him and put his head on Harry’s shoulder. 

“Never tell Gareth that you found me crying like a housemaid,” Samuel muttered.

Harry smiled. “I promise no one will ever know that you’re a human being.”

“Good.”

They didn’t speak for awhile.

“Why were you crying?” Harry asked, stroking Samuel’s hair. “Is it being home at last?”

Samuel took a long time to reply. When he did his voice was flat, with reasserted control streaking right through it. “It’s more that nothing here has changed. It doesn’t feel real.” Samuel firmly pulled out of Harry’s arms and Harry blushed. “Come along, supper is waiting.”

 

At supper it was impossible to believe that Samuel ever had or ever could break down in any way. He was laconic and apparently relaxed. He ate his supper casually as though he hadn’t spent the last five years living on near starvation rations. Harry wondered if this show was for his benefit or the servants’. Maybe both.

They repaired to the drawing room for port and cigars. The windows onto the veranda were open. Harry remembered their first kiss, out in the summer night. 

They somehow kept a conversation going about the election, about all the things Samuel had missed, about films and books, Harry hardly knew what he was saying. He had to school himself not to stare at Samuel too much. Samuel for his part mostly gazed out of the French doors. 

“Shall we take a walk?” Samuel asked abruptly at nine o' clock, standing up.

“Oh! If you like.” Harry put down his drink and followed Samuel out into the garden. 

It was a beautiful night. It smelt warm and earthy. The grass was soft so Harry kicked off his shoes and let his toes sink in. He smiled to himself. The soothing sound of the trees around the edge of the garden calmed his anxious soul a little. He thought that if this was all he ever had with Samuel, this awkward sort of friendship, that perhaps he could learn to stand it. It would be better than nothing. 

He deserved nothing more.

“Harry?”

Harry looked up. Samuel was standing there, barely visible in the dark now that they were a long way from the house, watching him.

“Yes, Sam?”

“You’re still in love with me, aren’t you.”

Harry’s chest tightened. Five years in prison seemed to have made Samuel more direct than ever. “Yes,” he said, quietly. “But I’m not expecting anything.”

“You waited.” Not a question.

Harry nodded. He wished he could see Samuel’s expression more clearly. 

“So did I,” Samuel told him. “I waited to get out. To be freed. Or to starve. Or perhaps to go mad, like some of them did. I waited for your letters, for the books, for news from outside. I waited to be moved from camp to camp, with no control at all over where they sent me. I waited for the endless Polish winters to end. I waited for food. Sometimes food was all I could think about. That, and blankets. And the way the lice itched.”

Harry didn’t say anything. He thought that anything he said would be ridiculous.

“And we heard rumours.” Samuel hesitated. “About other places, other camps. Not for POWs. And when I was coming back through Europe, when I was coming home, I saw one. The Red Cross were there and I wanted to help. The Red Cross were good to us while we were in Poland. So I went and I...I saw...” Samuel stopped.

Harry reached out a hand and Samuel took it.

And Samuel started talking again. Before long Harry wished that Samuel would stop. He didn't want to know this. But it was pouring out of Samuel like blood.

Afterwards they stayed like that, not speaking, just holding hands in the dark.

 

Samuel never asked him to move out of the flat so Harry stayed. He slept in one room. Samuel slept in another. Gareth had long since gone to live with his father and Samuel had to accept that, despite obvious misgivings. That didn’t prevent Gareth turning up on a regular basis to pester, talk and get spoons thrown at him, all of which he did with equal happiness. 

Harry cooked and looked for work, which he eventually found as a private tutor. Samuel spent a few months recuperating and then rapidly got bored and got a job at a publishing house where, as far as Harry could tell, he mostly just wrote nasty rejection letters and threw spoons at his secretary. Occasionally though he would come home with a manuscript and thrust it as Harry and say, 

“This isn’t too appalling. Read it.”

And Harry would. And it was usually a great book, a brave book, by some unknown author which Samuel would then bully his employer into publishing. Several very controversial books got into print because of Samuel.

Sometimes Joseph would come over, with or without Isobel or the children. Samuel and he would snarl at each other cheerfully, and there would be occasional attempts at bloody murder. Then Joseph would drink Samuel’s gin. 

Once though, soon after he got back, Samuel took Joseph into the dining room and they stayed there for a long time. Harry could hear the murmur of voices, and then a long silence. And afterwards Joseph had left the flat without a word and Harry remembered Samuel stood in the dark in Devon, with unimaginable horrors in his voice. 

Harry went into the dining room and found Samuel sitting at the table, staring down at the shiny surface, not moving.

“Was I wrong to tell him?” Samuel said, not looking up. “It’s in all the newspapers anyway. It’s not as if he didn’t know.”

“You’re a witness. You have to tell.” Harry walked over and touched Samuel’s hand gently.

Samuel turned his hand so that their fingers could tangle.

 

Christmas 1947

 

Harry was curled up in the window of his room, watching the snow fall. Isobel and Joseph and the children had gone home, the children incoherent with tiredness and over excitement. Gareth had also gone home. Harry actually had suspicions that Gareth had a sweetheart because he was suddenly very smart and kept blushing. Harry planned to politely grill him on it at the next opportunity. 

There was a knock at the door.

“Are you asleep?”

“No, please come in.” Harry smiled as Samuel came in. Samuel smiled back and lit his cigarette, leaning gracefully against the wall by the window. 

“I think that went well,” Samuel said. 

“Yes, I think everyone had a nice time.” Harry had been pleased with how the meal turned out considering the severity of the continuing shortages. He would have given his other eye for an orange. 

“I think Isobel is pregnant again,” Samuel observed.

“What?” Harry sighed. “Again! I don’t know what they are trying to achieve!”

“A cricket team?” Samuel suggested, smirking. “Anyway, she doesn’t take any crap so no doubt it’s as much her doing as his that she keeps getting pregnant.”

Harry shook his head, smiling. “Well, they’re happy. That’s the main thing. Although I’m not looking forward to helping them move house. Again.”

“I bet you a pound they end up with more than five children,” Samuel said.

“I’m sure even they won’t let it get that far, OK, you’re on.” Harry reached out and they shook on it.

When they did Samuel didn’t let go of his hand. He held it. Harry’s heart started thudding in his chest. 

Even after all this time he hadn’t quite given up, painful though that was. Nothing had ever been said but as the months passed and Samuel never said anything, it had become obvious that Harry would be waiting forever. That it would never be what it had been. They slept in separate rooms. They weren’t lovers. 

Except in Harry’s heart.

So he smiled ruefully, aware that he was blushing and Samuel probably knew why, and Harry went to withdraw his hand. 

But Samuel didn’t let go.

“Sam?”

Samuel put his cigarette out in the ashtray Harry kept there for this very purpose, and tugged Harry out of his seat and away from the window. They stood in the middle of Harry’s room, staring at each other.

Samuel touched Harry’s face with his other hand and Harry’s breath stuttered. “Do you remember when I said that we should start again, and go slowly?” Samuel said.

Harry nodded. A week before Samuel had been shot down. On that last day.

“Well,” Samuel smiled wryly. “I think we’ve gone slow enough, don’t you?”

“You mean...but I thought you didn’t,” Harry tried.

Samuel raised an eyebrow. “You mean you gave up?”

“No! I thought I ought to but...you’ve never even kissed me. It’s been more than a year.” Harry’s pulse was racing. Was this really...was it finally...?

Samuel sighed and bent his forehead to Harry’s. “For months after I got back, nothing felt real. It was all like a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from, the things I’d seen. And you...I hardly knew what to think about you except that I needed you around somehow. But lately...” Samuel leaned back and smiled. “I woke up.” He ran a thumb over Harry’s lower lip. “And now I’m just claiming what’s mine.”

So Harry kissed him, and Samuel kissed him back so hard that Harry’s lips bruised, and they stumbled down onto the bed, kissing and stroking and touching. Harry’s hips arched up at once, his responses instinctive and impossible to control. Samuel bit at his neck and Harry laughed gleefully and dug his fingers into Samuel’s hair. Samuel laughed too, muffled, against Harry’s skin.

They undressed each other clumsily, at least one button pinged halfway across the room and Harry doubted he would ever find it again. 

Once they were naked they slowed down a little and revelled in it. They lay in the darkening room while the snow fell outside and touched each other. Harry watched the pleasure pass over Samuel’s face and then lay back as Samuel spread him open, eased him open, with warm fingers. 

Samuel kissed him in one long kiss as he entered him. Harry was breathing hard. It hurt because it had been such a long time.

“Sorry...” Samuel whispered when he was all the way inside. 

“Love you,” Harry sighed, happily, kissing him again.

Samuel grinned down at him. “Well, since you insist...”

Harry felt a little shock pass through him. “You love me again?”

Samuel rolled his eyes tolerantly. “Never stopped, you idiot.”


	19. Epilogue

Harry woke up and for a moment he was confused. Why was he in pain? He shifted and winced.

And then he remembered and a smile spread over his face.

He turned his head and there Samuel was, sleeping beside him, naked as the day he was born but not nearly as innocent. Harry fought down an urge to cheer and then dance around the room. Much as he wanted to, much as he felt as if joy was melting him from the inside, he was sure that Samuel wouldn’t appreciate so unseemly a display. 

So Harry contented himself with snuggling down so that he could rest his head on Samuel’s chest and listen to his sleepy heartbeat, thinking that this was the most marvellous Christmas that he could imagine. 

He wondered why Samuel had chosen yesterday. Was it a sudden decision or had he always been planning to take Harry back? Had Harry passed some sort of test over the years or had he merely worn Samuel down? 

It didn’t matter. 

I’ll have the rest of our lives to ask him.

Harry’s grin turned gleeful and, he suspected, a trifle smug. 

“Well, I’m awake, if that’s what you were trying to achieve,” a sardonic voice informed him.

Blushing, Harry raised his head and looked at a sleepy eyed, slightly grumpy, Samuel. “I’m so sorry. I wasn’t trying to wake you.”

“Humph,” Samuel tugged him closer and kissed the top of his head. Harry’s heart nearly burst. “As if I could sleep with you being incontinently happy all over the bedroom.”

“I didn’t make a sound!” Harry objected, wrapping his arms around Samuel’s waist and kissing his stomach. 

Years. Years and years since they had been together like this. It hurt, the memory of all those years. 

“You kept smirking against my nipple. Most distracting.”

Harry sniggered to himself. He felt almost light headed. Samuel then proceeded to press him down into the bedclothes and kiss him breathless. Harry moaned and tangled his fingers in Samuel’s hair, hard at once, and delighted to find Samuel the same. Samuel’s mouth was hot and his tongue stroked inside Harry’s mouth, against Harry’s nipple, exploring, as though relearning Harry’s body. 

Harry supposed that they were both relearning a lot of things. He was reminded of one in particular when things between them became heated and Samuel reached down to slip a finger inside.

Harry yelped. 

Samuel sat up at once. “Sore?”

Harry wanted to lie because he wanted to do it anyway, but didn’t think Samuel would appreciate being lied to. “Yes,” he replied, hesitantly. “Very.”

Guilt slipped across Samuel’s face. “I got carried away last night, didn’t I.”

Harry nodded. Then he reached up and pulled Samuel back down on top of him, moved his hips so that they rubbed together. “We both did. You had me three times. It was glorious.”

Samuel’s hips twitched at Harry’s words and a thrill ran through him to think that he could create such a response just by speaking. He wove his fingers together at the back of Samuel’s neck and wrapped his legs around him. 

Hot, wet, sliding.

Just as Harry was about to lose control and start bucking, a firm pair of hands stilled his hips.

“Why,” he began but his confusion evaporated when Samuel moved down the bed, his breath loud in Harry’s ears, and took Harry into his mouth.

“Oh lord!” Harry groaned, pushing himself up onto his elbows so that he could look down, so that he could see Samuel kneeling between his legs. “Samuel...oh yes, oh please don’t stop, don’t...don’t...”

It was embarrassingly fast. The sight of Samuel. The sensation of his hair in Harry’s fingers. Most of all the maddening wet softness of it and the fact that it was Samuel, who would rather die than degrade himself, who was surely doing this out of love rather than erotic interest. 

“I’m going to,” Harry managed to pant, bracing himself for the loss of Samuel’s mouth. 

But Samuel didn’t move away. He only sucked harder.

Harry climaxed so deeply that it was nearly unbearable. He arched up, into him, sobbing in the back of his throat, fingers tangled in Samuel’s hair. 

Afterwards he was shaking so violently that Samuel held him tight and had to whisper reassurance. 

 

That evening they finally made it out of bed and Harry wandered around the flat in a daze, like a blissful zombie, tidying up and cooking a Boxing Day dinner with leftover food from Christmas. It was impossible to believe that this time yesterday they hadn’t been lovers, so Harry didn’t try to believe it. 

He dropped a kiss on Samuel’s neck while passing him. Samuel grunted and turned a page of his paper, but Harry could have sworn that a tiny smile tried to emerge on the slightly swollen lips.

 

Gareth rang the doorbell at six and was already enquiring as to the status of leftovers as Harry opened the door, but then took one look at Harry’s face and started blushing furiously.

Harry gave Gareth some Christmas cake in the drawing room.

“Um....Harry, are you alright?” Gareth asked, eventually. 

“Hmmm?” Harry said, standing by the window, serenely watching Gareth eat cake and occasionally admiring the whiteness of Samuel’s fingers on his newspaper. Standing was still a lot less uncomfortable than sitting at the moment, even though Samuel hadn’t had him since the night before. 

Harry smiled. Not like that, anyway. But Samuel had had him lots of other ways.

“Samuel?” Gareth’s worried voice broke into Harry’s dreamy memory of the morning. And the afternoon. “’ave you broken poor Harry?”

Samuel emerged from behind his newspaper like a tiger from the jungle, all narrowed eyes and poised energy. “I beg your pardon?”

Gareth’s blush deepened. “Well...I’m thinkin’ that you and he...are, I mean it’s obvious! And that’s great, really!” Gareth added, hastily. “I’m right happy for you ‘coz I was hoping and, bloody hell Samuel, you took your time about it. Poor bugger’s been waitin’ for you and pining and it’s been awful sad. I never did work out what you quarrelled about. Joseph said it weren’t our business.” Gareth had begun to look panicked, as if he knew that he had lost control of his mouth and feared for the consequences. “But just look at him! He’s got the creepiest smile on his face!”

“He’s happy. That’s what he looks like sometimes when he’s happy, as I recall,” Samuel growled, threateningly. “And for once Joseph was correct. It’s not your business.”

“Right you are!” Gareth nodded, apparently relieved not have been impaled by spoons.

Normally Gareth would have been but Harry thought that perhaps Samuel was feeling pretty bloody happy himself and didn’t fancy throwing things at Gareth, even though the boy had lost his head and made personal comments, and (worst of all crimes in Samuel Land) speculated on Sam’s emotional state.

Harry showed Gareth out soon after but couldn’t resist quietly asking, “How did you know, Gareth?”

Gareth shuffled his feet on the door mat and began earnestly examining the light fittings. “I reckon I’ve got to know you pretty well over the years, ‘arry and...I don’t know...you just look like you again. Like you did before when you was Samuel’s bu...ahem...sweetheart.”

Harry had a horrible feeling that the term ‘bum boy’ had just come within an inch of this conversation. 

“Joseph’s going to be ever so pleased. He’s been worried,” Gareth continued. 

As Harry went back to the kitchen to finish dinner (and it was a sign of Gareth’s maturation that he had shown the tact of not staying for that) he was a little peeved to know that his friends had been speculating about his sex life to this extent. 

He sliced some bread. 

So, Joseph had been worried. Presumably about Harry’s ability to live with the platonic relationship he had had with Samuel until yesterday. 

Would I have been able to live with it? If he had never reached out for me again?

Samuel came into the kitchen then and put his arms around him from behind. Harry had a sudden, painful, flashback to that time in the morning of their last day, before the visit to Gareth’s father, when Samuel had done the same thing. Before it had all fallen apart.

And suddenly, Harry had to ask.

“Were you testing me?”

Samuel stiffened and dropped his arms. Harry turned round, back to the cooker, and looked into watchful eyes. 

“Making me wait all this time, was it a test? It’s alright if it was, I deserve it. I would have waited forever, if you’d asked it. I just want to know.”

“No, it wasn’t a fucking test!” Samuel said, angrily. 

Harry’s heart sank. Less than a day and he’d already made Sam angry with him. “I’m sorry. Of course. I’m sorry.”

“What kind of a sadist would I have to be to...” Samuel exclaimed. Then he stopped and took a breath. “I didn’t deliberately let it go on so long. There was no plan. I just had some things to put right in my head and it took longer than I would have liked.”

Harry nodded and sighed with relief when Samuel pulled him into his arms. 

“I really would have waited forever,” he mumbled into Samuel’s shirt. 

“Silly sod.”

“I love you.”

Samuel tutted. “Now that’s enough of that. Don’t get all woolly on me.”

Harry grinned. Ah, romance!

 

Harry found it highly suspicious that Joseph chose that evening to return the bowl Isobel had borrowed to take home some leftovers. Boxing Day was not the most appropriate time to do that (Harry knew for a fact that Joseph preferred to spend it in the pub, listening to the horse racing on the wireless) and he couldn’t help wondering if Gareth had been scrounging food at Isobel’s table and blabbing.

Joseph invited himself in for a cup of tea and gave Harry a very sharp look when Harry winced on sitting down on the sofa. Fortunately Samuel chose that moment to go in search of more tobacco. Harry wasn’t sure if he was being tactfully left alone with Joseph for a ‘chat’ but it seemed unlikely. Gareth being tactful, comparatively, was world shaking enough. Samuel being tactful didn’t bear thinking about. Probably he just wanted to minimise his exposure to Joseph. They weren’t so much chalk and cheese, as matches and dynamite. 

Although Harry thought that a grudging respect had grown up over the last year. It dated from the day when Samuel told Joseph what he had seen in Europe at the end of the war. Harry didn’t know exactly how Samuel had handled that conversation but something had changed afterwards. Samuel’s contempt had become surface, Joseph’s dislike had become a game. If anything Harry thought they enjoyed sniping at each other, like a blood sport.

“I take it from your sore arse that you two are sweethearts again,” Joseph said, smiling around his cigarette. Harry felt himself redden and nodded. 

“I suggest you get him under control if you ever want to sit down without howling,” Joseph observed.

“Joseph!”

Joseph chuckled and then leant forward, took Harry’s hand and said, quietly, “You happy now, old thing?”

Harry felt tears prickle. “Yes, Joseph.”

Joseph squeezed his hand and there were memories of nightmares, and tears, and secrets told, and kindness, in his smile. Joseph, who had been the first to hear the tale and the first to bring Harry back to life. Joseph who had spent many years with an eye on Harry’s state, seen through his smiles, and had several times dragged him out of the house to the pictures, or to see the kids, or just to the pub, when Harry had been in danger of falling into the darkness which lurked in his mind. When Samuel had been far away. 

“Thank you,” Harry told him, fiercely. 

Joseph snorted and looked embarrassed. “Don’t thank me for nothing. I ought to be thanking you, I reckon. Because without you I would never have had the balls to marry Isy. You were the first person told me I was worth anything.” Joseph coughed, self consciously, and lit a cigarette, as much as to avoid Harry’s eye as anything else perhaps. “So it’s been nasty watching you pining all this time.”

That word again! “I was not pining!” Harry said, crossing his arms. “I was happy enough, just living here with him.”

Joseph smirked again. “Yeah, but it’s good to get your end away, ain’t it!”

“Really, Joseph, you are so very crude sometimes,” Harry was close to laughter.

“Yup,” Joseph told him cheerfully. “That reminds me, Isy is in the family way again.”

“That’s wonderful, Joseph! Samuel thought that maybe she was.”

Samuel came back into the drawing room to hear this last sentence and to see Joseph staring at him in surprise. 

“You worked it out?”

“Of course,” Samuel shrugged, sitting down with his pipe and a book. “She barely touched lunch and anyone who doesn’t eat Harry’s cooking has to be either ill or pregnant. And,” he looked disdainfully at Joseph, “Considering that you apparently have the sex drive of an exceptionally priapic Pan, I concluded the latter cause.”

“What’s priapic mean?” Joseph demanded of Harry. “Did he just insult me or complement me?”

But Harry was too busy glowing at the praise of his cooking, inadvertent as it was, to reply. 

 

That night Harry took a long bath to try to relax his muscles but there was no deluding himself. He was much too sore for what he really wanted them to do. Cursing he stood up and started towelling himself dry. Samuel who had been at the sink, brushing his teeth, turned round. 

“What are you muttering about?”

Harry sighed. “Just thinking how sad it is that one can’t always have what one wants.”

“Ah,” Samuel nodded. “I take it that my fucking you is a no go.”

“At least for a few days,” Harry told him, now dry and reaching for his own toothbrush.

“Fair enough. Why don’t you just fuck me then?”

Harry’s toothbrush clattered to the floor. His mouth opened and closed but for a moment he couldn’t make words come out. “But...but...I thought you said...”

Samuel merely snorted and pulled him into a hard, uncompromising kiss which left Harry’s already bruised lips burning.

Then Samuel drew back. “Brush your teeth and come to bed.”

Harry stared at himself in the mirror as he finished his ablutions. He could see how wide his eye was. It made a strange contrast with his glass eye, which of course never changed. He was reeling and so stiff that he had already made the front of his freshly laundered pyjamas a little wet. Normally he would have been annoyed at that but all he could think wasSamuel’s going to let me have him? Is it true? It can’t be true! But he said...

He realised that he had been standing with toothpaste in his mouth, too stunned to spit, and now the bicarb was burning. He sternly told himself to calm down.

Before going to bed he went to the kitchen and found a particular bottle in the cupboard. It was labelled ‘olive oil’. It was a cooking item he had recently discovered when he saw it in an Italian grocer’s shop. Once they had explained what it was he had been unable to resist it, even though it cost a fortune and he wasn’t sure what to cook with it. Now he thought it might have another purpose.

Samuel deserved the best, Harry thought, determined. No hair oil for him! 

Presuming that this was really happening. 

Harry felt faintly guilty as he went into the bedroom although he wasn’t sure why. Perhaps afraid that he wanted this too much. It frightened Harry to want things, for fear that he would lose the thing that he wanted if he got it. Samuel generally had that effect on him, more than ever in the last twenty four hours.

“Well, are you just going to stand there looking panicked?” Samuel asked, voice amused.

He was lying in bed, looking more relaxed than he had any right to in the circumstances, holding out a brandy glass. He saw Harry glance at the drink in confusion.

“Oh,” Samuel shrugged. “I thought I ought to be very slightly blotto for this. It might help.”

“I...er...see,” Harry placed the olive oil on the bedside table and sat down on the bed next to Samuel. He took a sip of the brandy, suddenly in need of Dutch courage himself. He winced. Brandy and toothpaste. Not a good combination. 

“Are you absolutely sure about this?” Harry asked, putting down his drink. 

Samuel had finished his own brandy and was now lying on his back smoking his pre-bed cigarette, staring up at the ceiling thoughtfully. “No, not really. But you always seem to have a fine old time when it’s you, judging by all the noise and I sometimes thought in the camp that if I was going to starve to death or get bombed to smithereens by the allies, that it was rather a shame to have not tried everything at least once.” Samuel hesitated and then continued, quietly. “When one’s life is put on hold like that one misses the things one never had a chance to do even more than everything else. And, besides, it rankles rather that those chaps at boarding school should have any influence on me now. If I don’t do it I want it to be because I chose not to, not because once someone tried to force me to do it.”

Harry swallowed past the lump in his throat and pulled Samuel against him and hugged him until Samuel swore at him and demanded to be released. 

“Just so we’re clear, if I don’t fancy it I’ll be saying so,” Samuel added, sternly. “And I won’t hold back from enforcing that even if you’re one thrust from orgasm.”

Harry started laughing, helplessly. “I wouldn’t expect anything less from you.”

“Humph.”

 

They were naked and kissing and Harry was terribly nervous and yet...yet somehow sure that it would be alright. That he wouldn’t hurt Samuel. That this was meant to be.

The oil proved to be a god send. The first time Harry rubbed his fingers over him, Samuel’s eyes widened, black in blue, and sighed. He didn’t react as he once had, years before, and relief made Harry sigh too. He exhaled slowly against Sam’s shoulder. Sam looked at him. Both their heads were on the pillow. They were lying side by side with Samuel’s knees bent so that Harry could lean his arm down and stroke.

He went very slowly. There was still a danger of panic, of remembered fear of violation, in Samuel, and Harry was determined that there be nothing but pleasure and a sense of safety. 

Feeling safe was probably something Samuel hadn’t known since earliest childhood, what with the boys at school, the war, and then the things he had seen. Harry knew that Samuel sometimes woke screaming in the night. That the horrors in Sam’s memory dwarfed Harry’s own. 

Samuel had seen that the world wasn’t safe, not for anyone. He had seen exactly what people were capable of doing to each other. 

Harry wanted to make Samuel forget, as much as he could, to feel safe again. To remember that there was life, still. 

So, with stroking fingers Harry took his time. He kept Samuel’s gaze every moment, watching always for the tiniest fear or pain or change of mind. He listened to Samuel’s breathing as it quickened. He watched Samuel’s lips part when pleasure made him gasp. He smiled at the surprise on Samuel’s face when Harry had three fingers deep inside.

“It...doesn’t hurt,” Samuel said.

He looked bewildered.

And very young somehow.

Harry smiled and kissed him. “I would never hurt you. You can trust me, Sam.”

Samuel stared at him thoughtfully, even as his chest heaved when he caught his breath when Harry thrust again with his fingers.

Then a decision seemed to have been made because Samuel ran his fingers down Harry’s arm and gently tugged on his wrist, withdrawing Harry’s fingers from his body. For a moment Harry thought, ‘he’s changed his mind.’ But then Samuel pulled Harry over and onto him, legs spread.

“I believe you,” he said.

Harry’s heart was beating so hard that he was sure a rib would break. He leaned down and kissed Samuel on the mouth. Samuel’s arms went round him.

And Harry entered him, slowly. 

Samuel’s hand tightened on Harry’s shoulder and the other went to hold the bed rail behind him. Harry was shaking, unable to rationalise the sensations flooding his body. Even if Harry hadn’t already known that Samuel was a virgin he would have been able to tell by the impossible tightness of him. So tight that Harry was scared that he was hurting him after all. He looked down at Samuel, unmoving, desperately searching his face for reassurance.

“Is it alright?” He asked, anxiously. “Are you alright?”

Samuel nodded, biting his lip, breathing through his nose. “I need a minute.”

Harry kissed him. That went on for a long time, and Harry touched him everywhere that could possibly comfort and pleasure, until Samuel began to relax a little around him and Harry could actually move.

When he did they both moaned.

“Sam...” Harry couldn’t help himself. He pulled back and thrust forward and when Samuel gasped and nodded, did it again. And again, and again.

And before Harry knew it he was making love to Samuel in a way he had dreamt of ever since he had met him, buried inside and with Samuel’s legs holding him, and with Samuel groaning in pleasure.

‘He’s loud,’ Harry thought, as he began to take Samuel harder and faster and Samuel threw his head back on the pillow, arching up to meet him, ‘he’s never been loud before, it’s always been me.’

‘Maybe, in his heart, he always wanted this.’

Even as Harry began to spiral into somewhere where there was no thought, he kept his eyes on Samuel’s face. He reallywould stop now, if Samuel asked.

But Samuel never did. He only held on when Harry started to slam into him, and made a raw sound of pleasure when Harry reached down and stroked him. Harry knew who would be orgasming first, if it took every ounce of his will power to achieve that. And it truly was taking every ounce. Waiting was agony. Samuel was so close around him and so hot. Every thrust was dangerously close to ending it for Harry, his body was screaming at him that this hurt and was too much. It had to end. 

But then Samuel shuddered around him, tightened, and Harry’s hand was soaking wet.

And Samuel cried out.

Harry let himself go.

 

Afterwards Harry took him to the bathroom, ran the hot water and they got into the bath together. 

“It’ll be easier for you tomorrow if you do this now,” Harry told him, softly, as he lay down and Samuel joined him.

“Hmmm,” Samuel said, thoughtfully.

He hadn’t spoken since the bedroom and Harry would have been worried but Samuel let his head fall back onto Harry’s shoulder and he could see that he was smiling. 

“So, how does it feel?” Samuel asked.

“That was going to be my question,” Harry told him. He was tracing little circles on Samuel’s chest. “It was how I knew it would be. I always knew it would be like that with you.”

“I didn’t. I thought it would be frightful. But it was...well,” Samuel glanced at him and smiled faintly, “It’s nice to know that we have another option when you’re sore.”

Harry felt himself twitch painfully, and due to the smallness of the bath and the way they were lying Samuel must have felt it too because he laughed.

“Yes, Harry’s dick, we’ll be doing that again,” Samuel said, dryly. 

Harry twitched again and they both dissolved into giggles like a couple of schoolboys. 

 

That night it snowed and Harry couldn’t sleep. He gently extricated himself from Samuel’s unconscious body, and pulled a blanket around himself. He went to sit in the window seat and watched the snow fall past the window and down into the street under the gas lamps. London was silent and white. 

He thought of the past. He thought of Spain. 

He thought of how little he deserved to be happy.

He thought of how Samuel knew, and would always know, what Harry had done. 

He wondered why Samuel still loved him.

“I can hear you worrying,” a voice remarked sleepily from the bed. “Either stop it and come back to bed or worry more quietly.”

Harry smiled and breathed on the window, and wrote a word, before going back to bed.

They slept.

The snow fell.

And on the window, a single word.

Hope.


End file.
